Debut author Rebecca Henry springs on to the YA scene with The Sound of Everything (Everything With Words, £8.99), an energetic and heart-wrenching account of a life in foster care. Kadie, its memorable protagonist and narrator, is prone to "meltdowns" that only make life worse for herself:
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. Why things just explode . . . The swearing at the sky and tearing things off the walls and the way colours blur, and not just with tears, and how all the sounds blend like my brain has forgotten how to filter . . .”
Kadie is sometimes a charmer, flirtatious and brash, but she also behaves in unpleasant, infuriating ways; even as vulnerability snakes in every so often (“I’ve never had a dad that I could call Daddy,” she reflects), it’s easy to understand the frustrations of her classmates and foster family.
There’s nothing simple here; while there are a few out-and-out bullies at school, most of the characters resist easy categorisation as allies or enemies.
Kadie’s forays into musical collaboration with some of her classmates, first for exam purposes and then for YouTube, allow for some self-expression, but they don’t provide a single clear coping mechanism for the hurt and trauma she still processes. There’s space here for things to be a little more complex and messy, and it makes the novel far more interesting than a straightforward “problem story”.
Henry’s ear for dialect and slang is particularly strong, and her depiction of adolescent bullying in the social-media age devastatingly sharp.
The uncertainty of life in foster care, even with the most supportive of families, is also touched on in Yasmin Rahman's second novel, This Is My Truth (Hot Key Books, £7.99); Huda's foster parents are expecting a child of their own, and she's worried she won't be "needed" anymore.
Huda turns to Amani, her best friend, for advice on how to be the perfect daughter, not knowing (as the reader already does) that Amani’s behaviour is shaped by fear. Tiptoeing around, both literally and figuratively, is a survival strategy in her house; her charming, TV-presenter father is also regularly violent towards her mother. Huda’s discovery of this, along with a “school prank” blog that reveals their classmates’ secrets, sparks the unravelling of Amani’s family life.
Rahman explores the toxic attitudes towards battered wives in contemporary society, with an eye particularly on the Muslim community; at a family wedding there is dismissive talk of someone leaving a marriage over “a little slap”, and Amani is all too aware of how little support there would be from her mother’s friends if she were to walk away. It’s undeniably grim subject matter, but handled with hope and a firm belief in the power of women standing together.
Family dynamics feed into the drama of Tamsin Winter's Girl (In Real Life) (Usborne, £7.99), a funny but thought-provoking – and at times cringe-inducing – dive into the often-bizarre world of online influencers. Thirteen-year-old Eva has grown up with screens; her parents began posting videos of her before she was even born. "It's kind of depressing," Eva muses, in a brief history of her most viral moments, "when your likes peaked at six years old".
Winter resists lecturing readers on the dangers of the internet; as with her first novel, Being Miss Nobody, she points to how it can let younger people have a voice, even as the capacity for those voices to be misinterpreted or misread is rife. Having the parents rather than the teenagers be the generation obsessed with social media is also a nice touch; navigating that brave new(-ish) world is a challenge for everyone, not just “the youth of today”, and watching adults get it wrong makes for a far more interesting story for younger readers.
There's a similar mood to William Sutcliffe's latest hilarious read for teens, The Summer We Turned Green (Bloomsbury, £7.99), which resists talking down to its readers as it tackles climate change and environmental protests.
Luke’s summer of environmental awareness kicks off when his sister moves out – albeit just across the road, where a group of protesters have taken over an abandoned house, destined for demolition in service of a new airport runway. Luke is fascinated by the commune, full of “beards and dreadlocks, lots of tattoos, lots of shapeless garments in lurid colours”, though he’s also conscious of the “faintly fetid, sweetish smell” or how all the food is inevitably brown.
His sympathies towards the cause are challenged by his father’s rapid conversion, who Luke believes may have had “his brain reprogrammed. The factory settings version of my dad would be more likely to hug an electric fence than a man in a vest top.”
The questions posed by this smart, entertaining, page-turnerl are the big ones for our age: how do we balance so-called “normal life” with tackling the climate crisis? Is it even possible? And do parents have any idea how much they embarrass their teenage children?
The rise of far-right nationalism in Britain forms the backdrop to several new YA titles this summer, including two dystopias in favour of “re-education” programmes for anyone falling outside of their new white supremacist norms.
In William Hussey's earnest and mildly didactic The Outrage (Usborne, £7.99), "immorality" and "degeneracy" are hunted out under the new Section 28 laws; in Melvin Burgess's typically gritty and pacy Three Bullets (Andersen Press, £12.99), any kind of dissident thinking must be converted: "Queers go in one end and they come out straight. Islamists turn into good Christians", and black people realise racism never existed, but was rather the recognition "that we're inferior, just like our nice white cousins have been telling us all along".
That the protagonists in both these worlds (a gay teenage boy, a black trans teenage girl) are immediately “the enemy” of those in power means that the plots unfurl as one might expect, with resistance and escape the main focus. (Incidentally, both texts position Ireland as a safe haven where food and tolerance are plentiful. That’s some successful rebranding at work there.)
It’s worth asking (as some wise teenagers I taught this summer did): who are books like this for? For teens dealing with prejudice in their own lives, a heightened version of it in fiction is unlikely enjoyable summer reading; is the aim here to teach “everyone else” of the need to be vigilant against discrimination? It makes for a worthy moral goal, but perhaps a less interesting reading experience for those already on board with, as Hussey puts it, the “message that difference is good and that defiance is essential”.
Luke Palmer's Grow (Firefly Press, £7.99) offers a more nuanced take, with protagonist Josh situating himself as "the lone fighter in some kind of dystopian universe" trying to save the world, but really grappling with falling down the rabbit hole of "nationalism", in which "English means Natural. It means Normal. It means Native." Having lost his father to a terrorist attack, Josh's "sense of being wronged . . . smoking like a small bonfire in my chest" makes him a prime candidate for grooming.
This unsettling yet compelling debut deserves a place on many bookshelves.
