Teen Fiction: As unattractive a coinage as it may be, the word "Kidulthood" is significant in what it implies about the manner in which societal notions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood are continuously changing and in the way they increasingly seem to be overlapping in our interpretation of them.
The various works of young adult fiction reviewed here explore, in very different ways, some of the manifestations and consequences of this blurring, resulting in novels that, at their best, will challenge their readers' preconceptions and make their own contributions to what is a fascinating, if problematic, social development.
Kidulthood serves as the title of a current, highly controversial film and now of a novel written by Jim Eldridge and based on Noel Clarke's original screenplay. The "explicit content" warning on the cover alerts us to the uncensored rawness of its content, which deals with a day in the lives of a group of west London 15-year-olds and, more particularly, with the behaviour triggered off by the suicide of one of their bullied classmates. As an insight into the world of contemporary British street culture - or, at least, one corner of it - this book will almost certainly shock its audience, of whatever age. It is unremittingly depressing, even if, in its final line, we see one of its central characters take "his first steps towards a free adulthood". The freedom may indeed have been won - but at what price?
For Simon, the 16-year-old hero of Paul Magrs' superb novel, Exchange, the "first steps towards a free adulthood" are traced with infinite subtlety and totally engaging narrative control. Here, the title derives (at least in the first instance) from a second-hand bookshop, the Great Big Book Exchange, frequented by orphaned Simon and his grandmother Winnie, both fanatical in their love of books. Their encounter with Terrance, the bookshop's armless owner, and with his female goth assistant, leads them into a spellbinding web of discoveries, most tellingly those concerning Winnie's old childhood friend, Ada Jones, now a hugely successful mass-market novelist.
This rich, engrossing novel is, in effect, a book about books, which impels its readers to reflect on the "exchange" which operates between life and literature and on the way in which they can illuminate (or, occasionally, confuse) one another. The contrasting quests of its various characters to establish their links between the two make for a beautifully structured, multi-faceted piece of writing.
Matthew Skelton's ambitious debut novel, Endymion Spring, is also concerned with the world of books, though the principal focus here is on their potential role as agents for transporting their readers into the darker realms of human nature. The action (and, in more than 400 pages, there is a great deal of it) switches between the worlds of contemporary Oxford and 15th-century Germany. In the latter, the printer Gutenberg wrestles with the machinations of Fust, his sinister financial sponsor, the events being observed and reported on by Endymion, a young mute apprentice. In a library in the former, 12-year-old Blake comes across a book, complete with dragon-skin blank pages, and, on its cover, the name Endymion Spring.
The reconstruction of the book's period and contemporary settings seems authentic and convincing but, particularly perhaps, its 15th-century world of German literature and printing is strongly redolent at times of Faustian legend. The interplay between this distant age and the library-centred Oxford of the present is entertainingly handled, often in the mode of a thriller novel just awaiting, Da Vinci Code style, the arrival of a lucrative film contract.
From the Mainz of 1452 in Skelton's novel we move, in Linzi Glass's The Year the Gypsies Came, to the apartheid world of 1960s Johannesburg. In this powerful and poignant novel the corrupt dysfunctionalism of the wider political system is compellingly juxtaposed with the tragedy of a family on the verge of breakdown. Or, more precisely, two families, since the "gypsies" who arrive as visitors into the lives of Emily - "almost thirteen" - and her older sister, Sarah, are eventually revealed to have their own dissensions and conflicts, a revelation that will have shattering repercussions for the two girls and their parents.
Beautifully and credibly drawn as the host family and their guests are - with particular strength in the complexities of relationship between two apparently very different sets of parents, daughters and sons - the most memorable of the novel's characters is the elderly Zulu servant, Buza. His stories, told in a style that reinforces their folkloric and mythic origins, give the novel a fixed, moral centre, creating a beacon which is the embodiment of loyalty, dignity and grace. It is absolutely right that he should have - literally - the final word in this deeply moving novel.
Lastly, a word of recommendation for Shining On, a collection of 10 short stories by writers such as Malorie Blackman, Melvin Burgess, Meg Rosoff and Jacqueline Wilson. Published in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, it ranges widely over various young adult areas of relevance and interest, even managing to remind us that "kidulthood" can have its moments of hope and humour.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading
- Kidulthood by Jim Eldridge Bloomsbury, £5.99
- Exchange by Paul Magrs Simon & Schuster, £9.99
- Endymion by Spring Matthew Skelton Puffin, £12.99
- The Year the Gypsies Came by Linzi Glass Penguin, £10.99
- Shining On by Various Piccadilly, £5.99