Young Adult Fiction

It is no easy task to write a good crime novel that features a youthful sleuth. Too young to drink, to drive, to wander the mean streets or to have a wasted past, young sleuths also have parents lurking in the background, ever ready to assert their authority about meals and bedtimes. Full credit, then, to Beth Montgomery for overcoming these obstacles and writing a gripping mystery. In Murderer’s Thumb, fourteen-year-old Adam Statkus and his mother have relocated from the city to the country in yet another effort to escape an abusive husband and father. Rosemary Statkus, jittery and terrified, is in no state to assert any authority over her son, beyond instilling in him the necessity of keeping a low profile. That becomes harder to maintain when Adam finds the decomposed body of a teenage girl buried in a silage pit. Then he stumbles upon a hidden diary that contains clues to the murder. Others would also like to get their hands on it. The diary is a McGuffin, and the climactic exposure of the murderer a bit hammy, but Adam is a tough, credible and appealing protagonist, and the evocation of a close-knit farming community and the build-up of tension are terrific.

‘There’s a fine line … between fear and desire’ muses Shutterspeed’s adolescent protagonist, Dustin. His may not be a novel revelation but A.J. Betts provides an intriguing study of obsession and its disastrous results through a narrative set on this tremulous boundary.

Lucy’s parents have separated, and she is off to London to visit her mother and her new family. She is fortunate to be able to fly: the world is in the grip of perpetual rain, and travel is restricted. Some inhabitants have become amphibians; others live in government camps. But Lucy’s fate is rather more intriguing. A cloud boy (seen only by Lucy) appears outside the plane window before being snatched away by a ghoulish cloud creature. As they wait in the rain at a bus stop in London, Lucy and a boy called Daniel are whisked up to Cloudland by a peculiar woman called January. There it is the task of Lucy, Daniel and assorted Cloudlanders to rid the heavens of the evil Kazia and thus stop the rain on Earth and prevent the onset of an ice age – an interesting premise.

Nickers and bogles, fulgars and wits: these newly minted creatures populate the Monster Blood Tattoo series. This world has the depth and complexity that characterises all good fantasy, and fans of D.M. Cornish’s Aurealis Award-winning Foundling (2006) will eagerly continue the journey and be well rewarded for doing so. Beautifully presented, the second novel is as impressive inside as out.

In the essay ‘Pay Attention to the World’, written shortly before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag argues that fiction is ‘one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives … [it] educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us how to be in the world’. While Sontag’s insight recognises the power of literature in general, the qualities she identifies are particularly significant in young adult fiction. Genius Squad and At Seventeen are two examples of the ‘rite of passage’ novel, where adolescent characters’ quests for self-discovery illuminate parallel themes in the lives of teenage readers.

There has been talk recently about the loss of regionalism in Australian literature and culture, and about the decline of Australian literature generally, but these two novels suggest that not only is Australian fiction flourishing but it is finding new ways to engage with the cultures of the region. They represent innovative interactions between Australia and Asia, for a popular audience.

Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics of chaotic coexistence.