"I feel as sexy as a slug / Sliming across walls," the narrator of CG Moore's Gut Feelings (UCLan Publishing, £7.99) laments from the bathroom of a nightclub. It's a relatable sentiment, though in this instance it's complicated by Chris's chronic illness; he's in there emptying his ileostomy bag, rather than crying over a lost lust object. "Not the best plan for seduction," he admits.
This autobiographical verse novel from Irish-born, Manchester-based Moore begins at age 11, with the diagnosis of a rare genetic condition that causes pre-cancerous growths in the large intestine: “Little time-bombs waiting to explode / And spread the C-word through my system.” Along the way, we witness Chris dealing with his father’s acquired brain injury and explore what it means to be gay, particularly within an image-obsessed culture. It’s a lot to take in, and some plot elements – such as a modelling scam – are raised and resolved far too quickly.
The text is sometimes a little clumsy and cliched (“this game of life”) but often redeemed by its arrangement on the page and illustrations from Becky Chilcott; one particularly strong innovation is the fading of text in poems about surgery and going under anaesthetic. The shadows and dark spots on several pages reflect both physical and psychological wounds; white space and large text indicate both recovery and hope. This is a book about resilience rather than the “sick-lit” cliche of illness-as-spiritual-gift, and a welcome addition to YA titles focusing on health difficulties.
Adiba Jaigirdar
A question for the modern queer socially aware teen: what do you do when the girl you have a crush on sets up a small business that involves appropriating your culture? Irish-Bangladeshi author Adiba Jaigirdar's debut The Henna Wars (Hodder Children's, £7.99) delves into heritage and sexuality in this cute and swoon-worthy lesbian romance set in a south Dublin school.
Within this world, the Americanised dialogue is fairly realistic, although there are still a few moments – the use of dollars rather than euro – a copyeditor should have caught. It’s particularly distracting in a title that is all about cultural representation, but it illustrates a broader point about what “diversity” really means in YA fiction: diversity as presented for an American audience.
Narrator Nishat is not alone in being a teenage protagonist fond of lecturing readers about her issue of choice while also prone to hypocrisy. She declares her love interest will not “take advantage of my culture . . . because she has white friends who’ll make her henna look chic and adaptable to western culture”; she also grumbles at how Spanish language students “inconvenience the rest of us” with their mere presence in the city centre. It’s realistic but sometimes ill-judged; when she declares that in Bangladesh, “being gay there is punishable by death”, the text never makes it clear that she’s misinformed on the law (both in theory and practice) and has fallen into the outrage trap so common in today’s world. It’s certainly commendable that this book has raised these issues within an Irish context, but a little frustrating that the engagement with them is not more nuanced.
Neal Shusterman
The heavy-handed approach is also evident in Neal Shusterman's Game Changer (Walker, £7.99), in which protagonist Ash tells us, "I thought having a diverse group of friends checked my box of social responsibility. Like there was nothing more for me to do than have some brown at the table" and learns about "how clueless and insensitive" he is, as a straight white middle-class boy who has never learned to consider his privilege. These comments early on in the text may, understandably, put some readers off – but how and why this popular football player has come to this perspective is a genuinely engaging, moving story that involves slipping in and out of parallel worlds.
Ash knows that most of us secretly believe ourselves to be the “centre of the universe” – because for a brief moment in time, he is. When he’s on the field, the hits that feel “world-changing” literally become so. He shifts into worlds where racial segregation still exists, where his own romantic relationships are reconfigured dramatically, where he and many others were born as the opposite sex. Assisted by some identical skater kids – who are really “multidimensional beings that project into your world in this unobtrusive, camouflaged form” – he struggles to get the world back to “normal”.
“Show, don’t tell”, although a drastic oversimplification, is a writer’s maxim for a reason; by the time a reader has lived through the different worlds Ash has experienced, and the dangers and complications of each, those early sentiments no longer seem preachy but completely justified and necessary. This is a gripping, powerful novel.
Flynn Meaney
At St Mary’s, where “they practically cancel classes every time the pope sends a tweet” and ostentatious banquet halls are “mostly reserved for visiting Republican senators who vote against birth control”, being an outspoken feminist is a tricky business. When rebellious Alex decides to stage a production of The Vagina Monologues at her Catholic boarding school, her main intention is to get kicked out – but it doesn’t quite go as planned.
Flynn Meaney's Bad Habits (Penguin, £7.99) is an absolute joy of a read, carefully balancing comedy ("I'm a feminist! I place bets on women's basketball games.") with a nuanced take on female friendships and being a teenage girl judged unfavourably by nuns, priests, peers and the world at large. Heart-warming and hilarious, this is a book you need on your shelves in these bleak times.
Emily M Danforth
A boarding school, complete with classic-style illustrations by Sara Lautman, also features heavily in Plain Bad Heroines (The Borough Press, £12.99), Emily M Danforth's follow-up to The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The setting is 1902, and teenage girls are caught up in a craze over a scandalous memoir, The Story of Mary MacLane, in which a restless 19-year-old yearns for the Devil, Napoleon, and her "anemone lady" friend in equal measure. (Both book and author are real and were a sensation in their day – the references within Danforth's novel may well have readers seeking it out.)
The tale begins when a copy of the subversive book is found next to two dead girls, well-known to be in love, and then moves into the present day, when a movie is being made of the “happenings” at this school. The two lead actors and the author whose book the script is based upon are our contemporary “heroines”, referred to explicitly as such by the omniscient narrator, whose confiding, playful tone guides us through this 600-page gothic delight.
Although this is, strictly speaking, published for a general audience rather than a specifically young adult one, there’s so much in here that will resonate with older teens, from the giddiness of first love to the sense of this as a kind of handbook for young queer women, full of literary and pop-culture allusions alongside the historical context of “young women elaborately crushing on each other . . . all grouped together at these schools out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from all other social spheres while they came of age romantically and physically”. It’s spooky, sexy and immensely entertaining.
