Much of what one thinks of as quintessential teenage literature addresses teenage angst and/or moral dilemmas. The Basic Eight, a first novel by Daniel Handler (Allison & Busby Ltd, £9.99 in UK) is a typical example. This is an engrossing story about a group of eight American high school students who hold dinner parties, listen to opera, fall in and out of love and perhaps drink too much. Told in journal form, the narrator Flann(ery) plays with the reader and leaves us, at the end, uncertain about everything. For much of its length, The Basic Eight seems to be better than many such books (it is well-written, intelligent and ironic, with characters who are, as Flann says, "real human beings") but it ends in a truly horrific "Point-Horror" climax of gore and violence. A post-modern novel which needs close reading and a strong stomach.
Contrast this with the most recent novel by the prolific, award-winning New Zealander, Margaret Mahy: 24 Hours (Collins, £10.99 in UK). Ellis, a wannabe actor, is home from school on his last holidays before university. He is dragged into a foreign country within his own city and, as in a Greek play, experiences love, danger (a car chase and a kidnapping) and confronts a monster from his past - all in 24 hours. Mahy has the gift of exact observation and convincing dialogue which, like Handler's, often adds humour to a pretty bleak plot. The difference is that Mahy's characters, although damaged, are not doomed and she ends on a note of hope.
Characters whom one could expect to be damaged occur in Gaye Hicylimaz's Smiling for Strangers (Dolphin, £4.99 in UK). The war is destroying Bosnia and the only family Nina has left is her grandfather. When he, too, is shot in horrific circumstances, she manages to escape to England with a returning aid convoy. Safety does not come automatically with her arrival on "peaceful" soil, but she eventually manages to find the mysterious Englishman who wrote letters to her mother before she was born. Both Nina and the people who help her behave badly at times and the problem of giving and accepting charity, without the giver feeling noble and the recipient resentful, is well addressed. A moving, genuine and thought-provoking book.
Thought-provoking, too, is Chains by Frances Mary Hendry, (Oxford, £6.99 in UK). The slaver's chains link Juliet (a rich merchant's daughter from Liverpool), with David (a Scottish crofter's son), Hassan (the spoilt son of a West African slave dealer) and Gbodi (a village girl captured by slavers). Juliet, who knows she could be a much better "businessman " than her namby-pamby brother Toby, impersonates Toby on one of her father's slave ships. Exposed to the cruelty of the trade, even with a captain who has won the bounty for delivering over 90 per cent of his cargo alive "four times out of six", she finds herself torn between her humanitarianism and her sound commercial sense. Hendry's knowledge of her subject is obvious but discreet - and the story is gripping. Although this is a historical novel, the issue of slavery is not relegated to the past but is linked to the greater issue of man's inhumanity to man, whatever his creed or colour.
Aubrey Flegg, who recently won the Peter Pan Prize 2000 for his first book, Katie's War, has again come up with a very likeable heroine in The Cinnamon Tree (O'Brien, £4.99). Yola, like Nina, has grown up in a land ravaged by war, in her case a thinly-disguised country in Africa. The armies have retreated but the minefields remain, and Yola loses a leg in an accident which changes her from an energetic 13-year-old to an unmarriagable cripple. As in Smiling for Strangers, it is foreigners who rescue her, in this case a Norwegian engaged in mine-clearance and Sister Martha, who runs the local school. Yola is brought to Ireland, where she is fitted with a new leg, finishes her education and meets Fintan, whose father has unwittingly become involved in the landmine trade. The plot moves back to Africa and an exciting climax. Flegg's sureness of touch only falters in the device of Fintan's dream: he has written a moving story with an important message.
In case these novels sound too "worthy" (although they are all well-written and well worth reading), not all teenage literature is serious stuff. Many novels, especially those for the younger end of the teenage spectrum, are escapist and none the worse for that. It is good, for example, to see Diana Wynne Jones's books being re-issued (by both Oxford Children's Modern Classics and HarperCollins) as a worth-tempting-your-Harry-Potter-fans-with alternative between fixes of J. K. Rowling.
Margrit Cruickshank is a critic, and the author of Circling the Triangle