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Fiction for Teenage Readers
To make a choice of five current novels is not so easy. Let’s assume that the co-ed teens and the Sweet Valley lot take good care of themselves – along with one or two other kinds, perhaps. I’ve finally chosen what seems to me the less predictable and more rewarding books for this age group – though each one belongs to a different area of fiction.
Rescue Josh McGuire by Ben Mikaelsen (Julia MacRae, 1 85681 135 2, £8.99) is both timeless and topical. On a spring morning in Montana, macho Dad denies that the bear he has just killed is a female. But Josh (13) has seen the little orphaned cub, and goes back to find it. Learning that it will be sold to the ‘laboratories’ he hides with it in the mountains; his dog insists on coming too. The story becomes national news; rough the boy’s one ally, Otis, an embittered scholar and conservationist, now a recluse who takes in injured animals, he sets out his terms. It’s a compelling non-stop read. But note the Postscript. The hunting laws were indeed revised in 1984, but a few years later the old bad ways returned. A new tale waits to be told.
Sappho Charney’s Password Protected (Hutchinson, 0 09 176437 8, £8.99) is included for several reasons. For one thing, it is often very funny. When the school combines computer-training with pen-pal exchanges, the reluctant pen-pal letters provide us with some joyful reader-hilarity. Walt and Quince, 11 or so, are the two chums. Both are bright at school but Dad is Walt’s problem. If Walt gets less than 100 for decimals, say, Dad wants to know why. Quince, who gets 100 in every test without even trying, lives with absent-minded teacher Dad. Mum left home two or three years ago, supposedly to study art in New York. Where is she now? But Quince suddenly thinks that he sees her, a bedraggled figure going into a bar. He calls out; she turns, and vanishes into the night. Obsessed with finding her, he makes Walt join in the daily mapped-out search. Yes, there is a weird confrontation. Did I mention that Walt is black and Quince a redhead white?
Ghost Song by Susan Price (Faber, 0 571 16410 2, £9.99) is, quite literally, a marvellous book. A serf in the far north, by trade a hunter, toils alone through the winter dark to keep the Czar supplied with furs. Preoccupied, he fails to appease the ghost of a dead trapped sable, and on his return a shaman comes to claim the man’s new-born son as his apprentice. The man refuses and refuses (a memorable scene). But the shaman haunts the man through his life, and still more, through his son Amrosi’s life as he grows. At last, to free his dead father’s spirit (cunningly trapped by the shaman) Ambrosi has to find a path to a realm which the living may not enter. ‘The spell is carved on a curse-bone, and that curse-bone is in the sable’s nest, high in the Iron Ash, at the centre of the Iron Wood, in the Ghost World.’
‘Only shamans travel the road to the Ghost World more than once,’ the teller reminds us, ‘and it is best left to them.’
This is the barest account of an intricate tale told in a stunning alliance of imagination and words. The author clearly knows her Norse myths and Russian fairy lore – maybe her Dante too. But in her rendering of the great final journey, she does not only hold the reader spellbound; she writes as if she were bewitched herself.
‘If strong ideas and actions offend you, read no more,‘ warns the young diarist in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi (Orchard, 1 85213 299 X, f8.99; 1 85213 300 7, £4.99 pbk). The book isn’t this year’s currency, I know, but it could have been missed and that would be a pity. In June 1832 Charlotte (13), a prim young miss from a fashionable English boarding school, is about to join her family in America. But why do the porters shun her appointed ship? (Father’s choice; he knows the owners.) Why are there no other passengers? Still, there is one gentleman on board – the captain, and she willingly reports to him all the crew’s mutterings. What she does not know – yet – is that he is a sadist and killer; that the men can get no justice on land, and intend to overpower him and hold a trial at sea. Of the great storm, of her standing trial for murder (Captain is accuser, judge and jury), of her father’s response to the diary, of the splendid end, you must read for yourself. There’s a diagram, too, of the ship if you require it.
I see that I have left too little space for a full length treatment of Book Five – maybe because of the question: which should it be? Instead I’ll name the great possibles: Margaret Mahy’s The Underrunners (Hamish Hamilton, 0 241 13170 7, £8.99) and the new paperback of her Dangerous Spaces (Puffin, 0 14 034571 X, £2.99); Peter Dickinson’s A Bone From a Dry Sea (Gollancz, 0 575 05306 2, £10.99), William Mayne’s Low Tide (Cape, 0 224 03151 1, £8.99), the paperback of Garry Kilworth’s The Drowners (Mammoth, 0 7497 1049 7, £2.99). Extremely varied as they are, all are distinguished in writing and, indeed, in plot. All show an absolute understanding of the curious, troubling, transitory state of being young – on the edge of the adult world, and often involved with it, but seeing it with a unique and surprising vision.
