When fleeing from zombies or vampires through a dystopian landscape into a parallel universe, or removing the alternate self from your brain cells, sometimes you long to get back to basics. These choices are all set firmly in the real world (give or take the odd ghost), exploring the diehard concerns of identity, family values, relationships and bullying in tried-and-tested fictional formats.
Jessica’s Ghost by Andrew Norriss (David Fickling Books £10.99) arrives 18 years after Norriss’s Whitbread (now Costa) award-winning story, Aquila. Now, as then, he tells an apparently simple tale with skill. The story of Francis, a would-be fashion designer who retreats from unhappy school life into a friendship with a dead girl whose wardrobe is limitless, has hidden depths. Its contemplation of the isolation of artists and the true nature of popularity will appeal to a wide age range.
Another bully-victim standoff provides the trigger for a classic urban teen thriller, Night Runner by Tim Bowler (Oxford University Press £6.99). Hero Zinny’s predicaments – an accidental brush with organised crime, a desperately poor home life, flawed parents with dirty secrets – are shared by many of his fictional peers. Zinny is on the run, as most young people in thrillers are, but he runs into trouble rather than away from it when he is forced to become a courier for the baddies. The narrative rockets along like one of Zinny’s routes through the mean streets in the small hours, helped by Tim Bowler’s superb descriptive powers. He is skilled at conveying bleakness and terror, while in the nick of time saving his nihilistic scenarios from becoming overwhelming. Zinny seems to have no hope, being afraid to accept the help he is offered, but finds salvation in his treasured book of nature photographs.
What Was Never Said by Emma Craigie (Short Books £7.99) has the momentum of a thriller although there will be no neat resolution for the two sisters fleeing their home in heartbreaking circumstances to escape female genital mutilation. Zahra’s family has built a new life in Bristol after leaving Somalia during civil war but “the cutter” arrives at the family’s British home in Zahra’s GCSE year. She and her younger sister head for London but the journey, in which they confront the less savoury aspects of mainstream UK culture, underlines the loss that separation from their roots represents. The careful and understanding representation of the girls’ mother’s troubled acceptance of tradition will encourage debate on this issue while challenging the continuing practice.
True Face by Siobhan Curham (Faber £6.99) is also concerned with teenage girls and their identity, packing an entire self-help shelf into a slim, approachable, attractively packaged volume that encourages love and acceptance for the real self lurking behind chirpy Facebook updates and sext-spk. It protects girls from the pressure to appear cool, zany, fashionable or sexy. The FACE test – if it doesn’t make you feel “Free, Alive, Confident, Excited, forget it” – is sound advice for grownup girls too. I wish I’d had this book at 15, or 35, or (if you must know) some time later.
Holly Smale’s Geek Girl, Harriet Manners, is inching towards FACE status in the fourth of a planned six novels, Geek Girl: All That Glitters (HarperCollins £12.99). Harriet hopes for a fresh start in sixth form but is still beset by queen bitch Alexa. Her recent success as a model is the cue for an exploration of false and true friendship, and returns to that most befuddling mystery of popularity. Harriet is super-bright and well meaning but slow to develop the empathy that helps people to draw others to them. A succession of misunderstandings and tragicomic scrapes (including the most spectacular failed party ever) offset the inner Harriet’s turmoil as she reveals her true self in her heartfelt letters to her lost love.
There’s more epistolary fun in Becky Albertalli’s touching and passionate novel, Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda (Penguin £7.99). Simon, a gay high school student, is trying to separate what Siobhan Curham would call The Inner Voice of Dating Doom from the elusive true love he glimpses in emails from his secret admirer. To the expected complications and misunderstandings, plus a backdrop of diverting but often needy friends, add the twist that he hasn’t come out yet and is being blackmailed.
Everyone in Simon’s world is three-dimensional, from his supportive sisters to his bitter nemesis, and “Blue” whom we get to know electronically. This tender, witty tale normalises Simon’s experience and shows him as completely lovable, with bags of empathy left over to share with Harriet, or anyone who needs it.
