The Worst of Me

Teenage Cassidy is pretty and adept at appearing cool, but feels secretly confused and uncertain after the break-up with her boyfriend, Ian. That relationship gave her status and a role as ‘girlfriend’. Now Ian has moved on to a new relationship with Sophie, but Cassidy spends a lot of time alone or with her gay friend Sam, another outsider. She has friends, but no longer feels she quite fits in with them, while Ian’s new relationship throws up all kinds of social dilemmas at their school, Samuel Bond.

Meanwhile at home, she is alienated by the presence of her mother’s new boyfriend Paul, whose well-meant attempts at advice and parental discipline she resents. Missing both the safety of ‘coupledom’ and the warmth of the relationship with her mother before Paul’s arrival, she is increasingly unsure of her own identity. Then the arrival of a new intake of boys from the wealthy Malton Road School, which doesn’t have a sixth form of its own, changes everything. Cassidy meets the charismatic Jonah who rapidly charms her into an impulsive new relationship, flattering her on the appeal of her supposed difference from the other girls at Samuel Bond. Absorption into his clique of Malton Road friends helps to shore up her frail sense of self, even while some of their conversation makes her uneasy and she is privately still unsure of the grounds for her acceptance.

Soon broken-off conversations and school rumours alert her to Jonah’s unpopularity and she learns from her Muslim friend Dee that Jonah and his friends have been stirring up trouble on a school website dedicated to religious discussion with ‘political’ comments bordering on racism. Reading the group’s simplistic and taunting comments on Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, only leaves Cassidy more confused. But when ignorance turns into ugly behaviour with the baiting of a Muslim girl by members of Jonah’s group, Cassidy has urgent questions to resolve – and to answer, since she is suspected of being present at the incident. Cassidy and Jonah’s relationship begins to founder in the wake of confusions over his degree of complicity in his friends’ behaviour and adherence to their views. Then the 6th Form Halloween Ball ratchets up the tension further…

Questions of identity, divided loyalty and trust reverberate throughout this sensitive new novel by Kate le Vann, which gets uncomfortably close beneath the skin of its young heroine. Cassidy’s moods – as she swings from euphoria over Jonah to anguished doubt in the face of friends’ criticisms and back again to uneasy trust – ring agonisingly true. This is a writer who has not forgotten what it feels like to be a teenager herself, but ensures that her characters inhabit an up-to-the-minute world with pressing public as well as private issues to confront.

The Worst of Me would benefit from classroom discussion to air the challenging subject matter it addresses, including an ambivalent ending which raises provocative questions. Both Cassidy and Jonah are embracing change, but how deep-seated is Jonah’s transformation? And just what is the reader to make of Cassidy’s own journey to face ‘The Worst of Me’ in the light of a continued desire to be ‘worthy’ of him? A sequel taking both characters further towards young adulthood would make fascinating reading.