“Everyone says it will get better after all this. When you’re older. Like it’s a sentence you have to serve. Like it will toughen you up if you can make it.” Bella, the 15-year-old narrator of Kathleen Glasgow’s latest unflinching novel, The Glass Girl (Rock The Boat, £8.99), is wise to include that “if” there.
We all know that it’s hard to be a teenager. We all get through it, and go on to lead productive adult lives – except, of course, for the ones who don’t survive, or who do but never quite thrive, whose “issues” continue to haunt them and trouble them for the rest of their days. The term the psychologists use is “survivor bias” – an error in thinking due to extrapolating from an incomplete data set. Human beings are resilient, certainly, and we endure far more suffering than feels reasonable, but we are not invincible.
What do we do with our pain? What do we do in a world where “everyone is so lonely”, as Bella notes, and when there’s so much we can’t control? Her grandmother died in her arms; her divorced parents agree on very little; her attempts to be “perfect” are faltering. She’s lived through pandemic lockdowns and is expected to get on with things as usual after school shooting scares. Of course, there are people who have it worse. But what do we do when we feel, as a girl Bella meets in rehab says, “I can’t live inside myself”?
Historically, formal religion has tried to put some meaning onto all of this – but we’re talking about the big questions here, the stuff we keep grappling with once we gain more autonomy in this deeply flawed world of ours. If we do not have religion, we still have stories. Stories offer empathy, a hand in the darkness, a path out – but gently, slowly, because slogans cannot reach us in that space. We need them, at any age, and it feels particularly important to make this point about young adult books, so often either dismissed as trivial fluff or demonised as dangerous.
Time of the Child by Niall Williams: A warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths
Felicity Hayes-McCoy: ‘So many of Ireland’s revolutionary women felt disillusioned and betrayed after the State was set up’
Unflinching examinations of contemporary teenage life in October’s YA picks
The Ukrainian female commander fighting Putin’s forces: ‘If I have to choose between death and captivity, I will choose death’
Glasgow’s account of a teenage girl grappling with alcoholism is as authentic and moving as her previous books, moving slowly towards the message that “You must live in spite of all this” – which feels like a platitude when devoid of the context of several hundred pages of plot development and character growth. For YA books to offer hope, which most of them try to, they must first acknowledge the reality of the pain their characters are in – to not dismiss, or belittle, or underestimate.
It’s a tough thing to do, and it is sometimes more upsetting for adults to read these books than it is for teenagers (it can break our hearts to see even fictional young people hurt like this, and it should, I think). But we need books like this. It helps, of course, when they are also beautifully written; Glasgow began her writing career as a poet and allows that experience to slip onto the page every so often, always rewardingly. A gorgeous, important book.
Sometimes a straightforwardly realistic, head-on look at trauma can be too much, and one of the strengths of fiction is its ability to draw on all kinds of “unrealistic” elements to better convey the big emotional truths. AS King always leans into the weird and surreal (think Vonnegut with 16-year-old girls at the centre), and her latest novel, Pick the Lock (Dutton, £17.99), invites us into a house where “the aesthetic is Pristine Victorian Prison” and a set of tubes known as the System is in place to keep difficult women in captivity.
The main difficult woman in question is 16-year-old Jane’s mother, whom she has been trained to despise. Outside of the home, her mother is Mina Placenta, empowered feminist rock musician – the sort of woman we may imagine is outside the reaches of toxic, abusive behaviour. Inside, things are different, but never cliched – there’s also an evil shapeshifter, a punk opera in progress, and a bigger secret about how the world works to be uncovered. This strange, ambitious, thought-provoking novel takes its young readers – and their pain – seriously.
The tough choices young people have to sometimes make are at the heart of Louisa Reid’s latest, Handle With Care (Guppy Books, £8.99), which moves between verse and prose as she alternates between two teenage girls. Ruby is in denial about what’s happening, while Ashley sees it clearly: “I focus on the here and now. The harsh strip lights. The worn floor, imprinted with smeared trails of muddy trainers. The white Formica tables, scratched, their undersides gummed into oblivion, wobbly plastic chairs. And my best friend in labour.”
Teenage pregnancy and motherhood are explored deftly here, with no easy or “obvious” answers given. The adults in the picture have their own messy flaws, are imperfect humans rather than two-dimensional villains. The impact of this secret on the girls’ friendship is handled with nuance and care, and the heart-pounding conclusion will stay with you.
“A different Joey is all he wants to be. But how can he be a different Joey if Vinnie is out there somewhere wanting to pull him back into his schemes?” James Butler’s second novel, Crying Wolf (Little Island, €10.99), sees his playwriting background put to good use in this fast-paced account of one young man’s attempt to move past his previous criminal activities, with a Dublin voice that could rival yer man Roddy Doyle’s (he is, pleasingly, name-checked in the book).
Joey’s trying to do better, especially as his girlfriend Sharon (whose accent goes “more green line Luas than red” around her college friends) has made it to Trinity. But his stepfather Vinnie is back, and even though he knows he shouldn’t trust him, shouldn’t get involved, he also desperately misses Vinnie’s affection and attention (or as Joey puts it, “how warm it felt to be called ‘bud’ once more”).
The very real dangers of being involved in illegal activities, alongside the desperation that drives people and the lack of viable alternatives, not to mention corruption from those in power, are all tackled here, but lightly, lightly – mostly we’re frantically turning the pages to find out what’s going to happen to this endearing, troubled, haunted protagonist. Compulsive reading.
“Black boys deserve love stories too,” Jason Reynolds writes at the end of the acknowledgements to his latest novel, Twenty-Four Seconds From Now (Faber, £8.99). Reynolds has tackled seriously gritty, hard stuff in previous books, so it’s strange to be citing this one as the “lightest” of this month’s fare – but it is true that taking young people’s lives seriously also includes their joys.
The book opens with Neon feeling “like an alarm clock just before wake-up”, and jumps back in time to reveal, in reverse chronological order, the two years that have led up to this first time with his girlfriend Aria, complete with reminders that real life is not like the movies, or indeed any other videos that young men may have consumed. The humour and warmth keep this from becoming too didactic, with the absolute cringe factor of parents delivering important talks (surely they know nothing of these things!) portrayed brilliantly.
