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Young Adult Fiction

Burn by Melanie Saward & We Didn’t Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough

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January-February 2024, no. 461

Melanie Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer living in Tulmur (Ipswich), is a fresh and insightful storyteller. Her first Young Adult novel, Burn (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 296 pp), is a tumultuous narrative about an Aboriginal youth, Andrew, and his obsession with lighting fires. It has a touch of Trent Dalton’s Brisbane struggle street, but the story draws us into psychological observation in Goori Andy’s cries for help and his longing for his parent’s attention. The novel begins with a bushfire lit by an unknown arsonist, in which a boy dies. This tragedy frames the narrative as we go on the journey with Andy and his mates Trent and Doug, wild teenagers who like to smoke dope and eat at McDonald’s. They are innocents in a world that ignores them as the author interrogates relationships between the lads and several irresistible young females.

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Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.

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Some Shall Break by Ellie Marney & The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

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November 2023, no. 459

Three new novels from Allen & Unwin explore gender power relations – with mixed results. In Ellie Marney’s Some Shall Break ($24.99 pb, 382 pp), a young woman helps law enforcement hunt a serial killer who is kidnapping and raping young women. Garth Nix’s latest offers interesting parallels, though The Sinister Booksellers of Bath ($24.99 pb 330 pp) includes plenty of fantasy elements to vary the formula. Meanwhile, Kate J. Armstrong’s Nightbirds ($24.99 pb, 462 pp) follows three different women who are navigating magical, political, and romantic intrigues. 

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Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

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Blyton got rid of them, Dahl demonised or mocked them but adults are definitely central in  the lives of young people in this recent trio of books for the emerging to the retiring adolescent.

The Keeper (Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp) is aimed at the younger end of adolescence, perhaps written with the view that such readers will be willing to suspend disbelief as they will need to in this romantic story of a troubled young boy’s search for a father. Joel is twelve and lives with his grandmother on the Yorke Peninsula, and fishing is his love but fighting his tormentor, Shawn at school, and generally being disruptive, takes up much of his time. However, from the outset we are alerted to Joel’s essential goodness when he defends the meek Mei who will not fight back.

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GriEVE by Lizzie Wilcock & What Does Blue Feel Like? by Jessica Davidson

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July–August 2007, no. 293

According to a recent government survey of child and youth health, around five per cent of young people over the age of twelve suffer from a major depressive illness. Sources of such depression, according to the survey, include stressful events, trauma and heredity. Increasingly, the origin of the illness remains unknown. These disconcerting figures indicate the need for intelligent and accessible discussion about mental health in young adult literature. Both GriEVE and What Does Blue Feel Like? oblige. The first investigates the painful mechanisms of grief and mourning; the other, clinical depression triggered, amongst other things, by abortion.

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Few traits typify the mythology of the Aussie bloke quite as strongly as a love of water and a laid-back attitude. Increasingly acknowledged is the role violence plays in shaping our laconic beach-lovers. Three Young Adult novels tackle this sinister undercurrent of male identity, but in different ways and to different effects. In Kate Hendrick’s Fish Out of Water (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp), swimmer Finn aspires to be a ‘top bloke’ like his father, but does he really? Philip Gwynne’s Taj just wants to surf, but he must deal with a foreign government intent on executing his father in The Break (Penguin Books, $19.99 pb, 384 pp). In If Not Us (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 272 pp), by Mark Smith, surfer Hesse is trying to save the environment but soon discovers that taking a public stand on a controversial issue can have dangerous consequences.

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Dystopias, apocalypses, and postapocalypses have been part of Young Adult literature long before ecological disaster became the prevalent social narrative. They give writers a chance to indulge the youthful desire to upset the table and start over, rather than partake in the tedious and often fruitless work of actual progress. Blowing stuff up is far more exciting than endless meetings or political discussions. Asphyxia’s Future Girl, Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s The Other Side of the Sky, and Charlie Archbold’s Indigo Owl each deal with the end of the world and how young people navigate it.

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These three Young Adult novels differ wildly in tone, execution – even their grasp on reality. Georgina Young’s début novel, Loner (Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 256 pp), won the Text Prize for an unpublished Young Adult manuscript in 2019, and was a deserving winner. Text has decided to market it as adult fiction, but it works well as a crossover novel. Her protagonist, twenty-year-old Lona (does not sound like loner!).

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A whistleblower’s child hides from a drug ring in the Blue Mountains. A sixteen-year-old rolls through life like an armadillo. A Melbourne high-school graduate wrestles with her insecurities. The daughter of a Chinese restaurateur juggles her responsibility to care for her siblings as her mother’s health deteriorates.

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