No young adult novel should be dismissed too quickly when it comes with an endorsement from Robert Cormier to the effect that it "strangles your heart" over what happens to the relationship between its two main characters. In the case of John Marsden's Letters from the Inside (Macmillan, £4.99 in UK) such caution is wholly justified; this is heart-breaking material, written and structured with style and compassion.
Set in contemporary Australia and presented in epistolary format as a year-long correspondence between Mandy and Tracey, Marsden's story sees the two teenagers gradually grow towards greater knowledge of the truth about each other. Or so it seems, for it is part of the author's beguiling technique that neither, even as the tragic denouement unfolds, can ever quite be sure what the truth is. When Mandy, in reply to a magazine advertisement, first becomes Tracey's pen-pal, there are few signs of what is being said - or not said - between the lines of their letters. But slowly and subtly there emerge revelations quite devastating in the demands they make on our need to adjust to changing perceptions of fact and fantasy. Our deepest assumptions about society and its values, and especially crime and punishment, are severely tested here.
When Fawn, the female protagonist of Julia Clarke's The Starling Tree (Collins, £4.99 in UK), reflects at one point that "the full weight of adult misery has washed me clean," we realise that we are clearly in the realm of teenage angst. Among much else, Fawn has to contend with a twin brother who veers towards delinquency and parents who live (father more than mother) in distressed hippie mode. And as for love! What of Adam, the boyfriend about to leave their ramshackle Leeds school? Or socially superior Simon? Or Ben, the amiable music teacher? Or Nick, vastly transformed since their first meeting, neatly reappearing in the closing chapter? It does not quite amount to a "heart-strangling" experience but it has its perceptive moments.
The songs composed and sung by Fawn, we are told, deal with "kids who have no hope in life but their own mad dreams". It is a quotation which comes easily to mind in reading Melvin Burgess's Billy Elliot (The Chicken House, £4.99 in UK), an extension into full-length novel form of Lee Hall's original screenplay. Even those who have seen and enjoyed the film will find that Burgess's gritty version enhances the experience, particularly in the way he has structured the story through the use of seven different narrating voices. These are all male (Billy's female dance teacher is not included) and combine to depict an environment where the masculinity comes in many shades, both sexual and political. The sense of male vulnerability and confusion which Burgess captures so tellingly is also handled with considerable success in Trevor J. Colgan's The Stretford Enders (Red Fox, £5.99 in UK). Here, as he moves with his mother from Dublin's northside to Dun Laoghaire, 14-year-old Luke has only his footballing prowess to rely on as he negotiates the complexities of his new surroundings at home and school. But authentic as the sporting dimension of the book and its scenes of school bullying are, its real strength is in its touching counterpointing of Luke's feelings about his absent father and those of his landlady about her dead husband. One of the few Irish teenage novels (as yet) to include considerations of race and colour, this is strong, topical fiction.
We remain in a south-Dublin setting for Claire Hennessy's Being Her Sister (Poolbeg, £4.99), the second outing for this writer who is herself a teenager. As in her debut novel of last year, Dear Diary, Hennessy shows here an ability to capture the passing concerns of early female adolescence, particularly its obsessions with clothes, discos and, of course, boys. But, perhaps because her characters are now slightly older, this is a sharper, more focused dissection of the species. It is quite convincing psychologically in its portrayal of the volatile relationship between two sisters, Danielle and Rachel, with some horrifying insights into over-ambitious mothers and the ease with which even the closest of friends can manipulate and be manipulated.
Robert Dunbar's most recent book, Skimming, has just been published by O'Brien Press