Margaret Robson Kett reviews four recent Young Adults novels

Friendship can be a powerful force for change in a young adult’s life. These four new books explore the full gamut of the unlikely, advantageous, and destructive consequences of relationships. Between Us (Black Inc., $19.99 pb, 275 pp, 9781760640217) is told by Clare Atkins in three voices. Anahita – known as KIN016 in the detention centre where she is incarcerated – has been given permission to attend a Darwin high school. Kenny is a Vietnamese-born man newly employed as an officer at the centre. While escorting her to the school bus, he tells Anahita that his son Jono is also a student there and incautiously suggests that they might become friends. Jono is wounded by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, compounded by his girlfriend’s departure. At first he speaks in choppy, self-absorbed sentences; later, there is self-revelation and a shy friendship with Anahita. As the three of them connect, the realities of their separate pain become apparent to the reader – made easier by the design of the pages, so that characters’ names appear above each of their narrations. Anahita’s care for her depressed and heavily pregnant mother, as well as for her little brother, is well drawn, and the memories of her life in Iran put the reader in touch with the trauma she has endured – appropriately, these are in bold black print. It is unusual for a parent’s voice to be so constant in a Young Adult novel, but there is a parallel story being told. Although the storyline of Kenny’s conflict about his role in the centre is not as well developed as it could be, his sister Minh’s story is compelling. She tells of making the journey from Vietnam on a boat, and the book recalls the welcome those survivors received from ordinary people in Darwin harbour. This sketch of Jono’s aunt hints that this ‘easy’ entry has not made her life as an Australian any less complicated. Its telling signals a turning point for Kenny and Jono’s relationship. I hope this able writer will take the story and expand it. NameEmail Please enable the javascript to submit this form A post-apocalyptic world – beloved of Young Adult writers – is given a new twist by the accomplished A.J. Betts in Hive (Pan Macmillan, $16.99 pb, 261 pp, 9781760556433). Difference disrupts the smooth workings of most societies, but within the small settlement that Hayley lives in, illness must be concealed. Her blinding headaches remain a secret, except to her best friend, Celia. It is in the perfect place that she finds for self-healing that her world begins to unravel; the ruse that Hayley uses to enter a forbidden area literally comes back to bite her. The system of child education, the benevolent and yet inflexible working roles, the demarcated society bound by strict religious practices, as well as the restriction on printed literacy, all sound, for the reader, like a society remaking itself. As a result of her rule-breaking, Hayley forms ambivalent, fleeting attachments that might have blossomed into romance in a more conventional teen novel. (Betts’s 2013 book Zac and Mia, about a similarly nuanced relationship, has recently been adapted for the screen.) The complications that could arise from breeding within a restricted population are managed by the hierarchy with a system of arranged ‘marriages’ within days of a death. Hayley expects that Celia’s impending ceremony will divide them forever, but its unexpected collapse precipitates a potential escape for her. Betts’s splendid imagining of what catering for a wedding might look like when the only purpose is a pregnancy is an example of her considerable skill at storytelling. (The second in this two-part series will appear in 2019.) I Had Such Friends laments narrator Hamish in Meg Gatland-Veness’s new novel (Pantera Press, $19.99 pb, 278 pp, 9781925700015). Hamish, laying himself bare, addresses us directly from his isolation on a rural property. His family have suffered the tragic loss of his younger sister in a terrifyingly trivial accident, and it becomes apparent that he has never recovered from his role in it, albeit as a helpless observer. His parents are locked into the never-ending work cycle that is primary production, and his one friend, Martin, is similarly a loner. This all changes when Charlie Parker, the shining star in his peer group, dies in a car accident and the whole school is consumed by grief. Change erupts on all sides, seemingly triggered by Charlie’s death, and new and unlikely attachments force Hamish to confront everything he thinks he knows about himself. Gatland-Veness packs a lot into this novel, and the narrator, Hamish, speaks directly to the reader. This is not always as effective as it could be: on more than one occasion the author slips into an instructional voice, in case the reader doesn’t ‘get it’. The author’s day job as a drama teacher at a regional high school ‘enables her to capture the modern-day Australian teenage experience’, according to her publisher. She definitely has an ear for the way young people speak. Hanging out with Peter Bridges, the bad boy in town – Charlie’s former ‘best friend’ – Hamish discovers his true self. When his sexual identity ends up a key factor in his emotional recovery from grief and into selfhood, some clichés surface. It is hard to imagine that a boy born in the twenty-first century would never have heard or thought about sexual difference. The idea, articulated by Hamish, that his father would never have known or liked a gay person, is puzzling – Dad may grow cabbages, but he isn’t one (at the very least he is a product of the 1980s himself). Perhaps Gatland-Veness wants to convey typical teenagers’ belief that their parents are ignorant of, or immune to, sexual knowledge of any kind. More seriously, another potentially devastating death ends the book. The author swiftly moves Hamish through it and out into the ‘real’ world of the big city where he can be himself. Eliza Henry-Jones’s third published book, and her first for younger readers, is titled P is for Pearl (Angus & Robertson, $19.99 pb, 978140754931). Gwendolen P. Pearson is living in a small seaside town in Tasmania, and studying hard – towards a future she can’t see clearly. Not even sure of her name, she experiments with scribbling ‘Pearl’, but composes diary entries in her full name (I’ll call her Gwen for the rest of this review). Her father has remarried a former teacher who is a loving mother. Gwen’s stepbrother Tyrone, a combination of surfer on a spiritual quest and a vicious practical joker, is nevertheless there for Gwen when she needs him. Her best friend, Loretta, is sure that the future lies on the mainland and is doing her best to persuade her to come too. Along with a New Age shop owner, an eccentric horse-riding artist, and a local police officer with a ready ear and supply of biscuits, there should be nothing Gwen lacks in the way of emotional support, and yet she is haunted by unanswered questions about the deaths of her brother and mother. The sea is a balm for her anxiety, with visions of mermaids providing comfort. Her search for information that will help to clarify her disjointed childhood memories is complicated by the arrival of newcomer Ben and his sister Amber. What is their secret? The conspiracy of secrets that is both possible, and impossible, within the literary country town is explored well by the author. The portraits are largely warmly eccentric; Henry-Jones has clearly had fun creating them. Both the clamour and comfort of friends of all generations are demonstrated in these contemporary Australian novels for young people.

Margaret Robson Kett

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