Young Teens: Niall MacMonagle charts some challenging and dramatic offerings.
'Twice in your life," says Penelope Fitzgerald, "you know you are approved of by everyone: when you learn to walk, and when you learn to read." First steps, eventually, allow us to step out and with this round-up, the reading teenager should stride.
Drummer by Jan Page (Walker, £5.99) taps into many a teenage dream - to be in a band - but what makes this book different, interesting and worthwhile is how it also plays with time and death in its central section, "Rewind".
Sixteen-year old Liam, in an out-of-body experience, visits his 17-year old Mum. It's 1986: "And what could I say? 'Hi Mum and Dad, I'm the ghost of the baby you're pregnant with'?" Complicated plotting never confuses. The Battle of the Bands is grippingly dramatic and Page creates a haunting character in Murph "who would never grow older and fatter, never get the sack from a low-paid job, never hit his wife or swear at his children".
Good Girls Don't (Poolbeg, €6.99), Claire Hennessy's ever-chatty fifth book, though middle class, is never middle-of-the-road. Anti-heroine Emily's experience of school and out-of-school activities (and we're not talking hockey) is deliberately and, at times, maddeningly adolescent. Promiscuity, "bendable sexuality" and a suicide are par for the zig-zag course and, though Emily at 17 asserts and shocks, she also survives a world of grim, confused and moody realism.
Fine storytelling in Joyce Carol Oates's Freaky Green Eyes (HarperCollins, £5.99) makes this an exceptionally good coming-of-age novel. When Franky (14) meets 18-year-old Cameron, she no longer feels gawky, self-conscious. Resisting Cameron's aggressive advances is the first stage in her struggle. An "I" voice creates a real sense of an interior life as it copes with family quarrels, a murdered Mom, a prison sentence, and Franky, reassuringly, comes through.
Love My Enemy (Andersen, £5.99) by Kate MacLachlan, set in the "sort of peace" of Belfast, explores asylum seekers, cultural tensions and differences. Zee, whose father was shot dead, befriends Tasha whose "Step" is Bosnian and whose "real dad" is "dead busy". MacLachlan portrays troubled, bigoted Gary, punishment beatings and the futility of old sectarian hatreds in an impressive, fluent, provocative narrative that wisely reminds us that in the end "We make our own luck".
Apocalypse by Tim Bowler (Oxford, £12.99) is dramatic from the word go and tackles big themes: God, religion, family, hope. Kit and his parents are shipwrecked on hellish, ritualistic Skaer Island, "a world with no future".
Fanatically religious and savage, Skaerlanders distrust literature and music. Kit discovers an image of his older self, ugly and birthmarked, meets and befriends a girl on the run, becomes estranged from his parents and "walks into the past". The island, though uninhabited for 400 years, is vividly, mysteriously resurrected in this compelling, redemptive and impressive story.
Bisto Book of the Year winner Aubrey Flegg's The Rainbow Bridge (O'Brien, €9.95) takes up where Wings Over Delft ended but skips on from an explosive 1654 ending in the Netherlands to Revolutionary France in the 1790s. It traces 18-year-old Gaston Morteau's journey from soldier to lieutenant to captain. Much more than a history lesson, Morteau rescues the Louise portrait from a frozen Dutch canal and, unusually, Louise, "a guest of Gaston's mind", becomes not only an inter-active Guardian Angel figure in several lives but matchmaker. Some teenage fiction is custom made, market-driven and opportunistic but here is an original, interestingly-imagined and challenging book. Its finely-textured writing with historical flavour and a strong plot make this a rare achievement.
Another middle-of-a-trilogy novel is Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye (Doubleday, £12.99). (The Amulet of Samarkand sold 75,000 in hardback.) We're in a world of its own here: London is at the heart of Empire and Nathaniel, now 14, is one of the Government's working magicians.
Commoners are meant to be subservient and appreciative, live "little lives", but Kitty is part of the Resistance. There's a travesty-of-justice court scene, an explosion in Picadilly, a tomb break-in, demonic entities - djinns, afrits, imps - as personal slaves, Black Tumbler evil spells, a talking skeleton; and Nathaniel, though he had resolved never to summon his demon, "backchatter" Bartimaeus, again, does. Bartimaeus is given a first person narrative and the writing flows through 500 pages of adventure with ideas about rules, freedom and self-discovery. In the end traitors are exposed, Nathaniel is promoted, Bartimaeus dismissed. He'll be back.
Best until last: Terri Paddock's Come Clean (Harper Collins, £5.99) tells of 15-year-old twins Joshua and Justine who both end up in a rehab like no other. Based on Terri Paddock's sister's experience of a real private rehab centre in the US, the frightening atmosphere and the suspect, improper therapy are powerful warnings. This is one of those books where you become so involved and so caught up in Justine's sassy and sensitive narrative that you feel you're living, seeing, hearing all that's going on in her troubled life. "Joshua's in my head, and I'm talking to him all the time".
Memories layer her account of adolescent sexuality, drugs, suicide and institutional abuse. Justine's sweet 16th birthday is the stuff of lonesomeness; and yet "I'll go on". For 15-plus, this disturbing, engrossing, unforgettable, up-close-and-personal story delivers.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin