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All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth

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Waterstones

Elizabeth Klehfoth

Penguin

9780241329498

July 2018

paperback

This is an exceptionally good pageturner of a novel.

It opens with an immaculately written Prologue, a single page of beautifully cadenced scene-setting prose which immediately sets up high expectations.

The opening chapters are set in a college called Knollwood Prep and I was briefly concerned that the book was going to be a conventional teen drama about a secret student club.

But it opens up in the fourth chapter to bring in a compelling back story involving the main character’s family.

Charlotte Calloway’s father, Alistair, had attended Knollwood a generation earlier and been a member of the the same society that Charlie herself joins.

From this point on the novel is variously told from the points of view of Alistair, Charlie’s mother Grace, and of Charlie herself.

As the thriller builds momentum, and the mystery surrounding both Grace’s disappearance several years previously and the true explanation behind the apparent suicide of a student who was at Knollwood with Charlie’s father, the reader is increasingly drawn into a web of intrigue and betrayal involving the older generation.

Klehfoth doesn’t pull any punches when writing these scenes, which is what makes the book so admirable. This is very much a Young Adult novel, rather than a work of teen fiction.

Some of the contemporary escapades involving Charlie and her fellow students can have a bit of a Riverdale vibe about them, even occasionally of boarding school antics as seen in The House of Anubis. Klehfoth’s writing never falters, always hitting the appropriate note.

She is particularly good at describing the foibles of the rich and privileged set who make up the membership of the secret society and from which Charlie herself comes. So good I wondered if the author herself comes from a similar background.

I had the opportunity to ask her this question during a lightning interview at an event in London recently. Apparently not. Her Indiana upbringing was far more humble, though when she attended college in Orange County, she was surrounded by students from a smart set whose parents would, quite literally, be able to buy them houses.

I also learnt that All These Beautiful Strangers is her first attempt at full-length fiction, which makes the way she manages to structure and interweave her mixed point of view narrative so extraordinary.

The book is already optioned and I can imagine it making a really good Netflix drama. But it’s as a thoroughly good read that I am recommending it here and giving it the full five out of five, because this is as good a YA thriller as you are likely to come by this year.

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Misfit by Charli Howard

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Waterstones

Charli Howard

PenguinRandomHouse

9780241328828

February 2018

paperback

Charli Howard struggled for years to become the size 6 or under model her (then) agency was demanding. After they finally dropped her, she gained notoriety when her post of protest on Facebook went viral. She is now a highly successful ‘curve’ model known for making a stand against the fashion industry’s obsession with slimness, and for being the public voice of the body-positive movement.

I was keen to read MISFIT, both as a reviewer of YA books and as someone who regularly photographs models and aspiring models.

Told with a free-flowing, highly-readable momentum, her memoir should become required reading for any teenager currently involved in, or with ambitions of becoming involved in, the fashion industry.

At around 250 pages in length, it’s not until page 145 that Charli, encouraged by an ex-boyfriend, makes her first contact with a modelling agency. More than half of the book, in other words, is devoted to her childhood, education and adolescence. Some may feel she over-eggs her early misfit-edness. The first line of the book is “I am not normal” and she is keen to demonstrate how “cray cray” she has been since an early age. Exaggeration is permissible in the name of entertainment, and in order for her story to resonate with readers Howard has clearly realised (or been steered to realise by those helping this book reach its final form) the need to build a narrative.

Maybe it’s not as unusual as she suggests for a 4-year-old to imagine she is a dog, and to keep this up until the age of 6. Many young children imagine things with great intensity and force adults to act in accordance with their ‘delusion’. It’s hardly a sign of not being normal.

Similarly, the story of her disastrous sleepover at a friend’s house when, at her instigation, they climb onto the balcony of a neighbour’s property and smear toothpaste all over the windowpanes – an escapade somewhat magnified when Charli casually throws a hairbrush onto the bed and smashes the screen of a phone belonging to her friend’s father – is surely a fairly typical example of adventurous naughtiness that many of us indulged in between the ages of 8 and 10. To be fair, she does describe herself as a “relatively normal eight-year-old schoolgirl growing up in 90s Britain”. It’s a great story though, and the book would be much the weaker without it.

Charli’s father was in the forces and the family were frequently on the move. While stationed in Germany, Charli is particularly affected by what she remembers as a pervasive sexuality. The school bus travelled each day through “an infamous street full of sex shops”.

Eventually, Charli is sent back to England to stay with her grandparents and attend a boarding school during term time. Even when her mother returns to England, Charli continues to be a boarder.

The picture that emerges from this part of the book and from all the anecdotes both of actual bad behaviour and of being wrongly blamed for other people’s bad behaviour is of a child craving overt love, affirmation and stability from her close family.

In its place, affirmation from her peer-group becomes all-important. Much of her behaviour – pulling the emergency STOP on a train – comes across as attention-seeking. But she does also have a knack for being at the centre of trouble for which she is not principally to blame. The best example of this is when the house of one of her best friends is trashed (£30,000 worth of damage) after it is gate-crashed (a story I remember reading about in the national press).

Born with a pear-shaped body frame she is soon comparing herself unfavourably with her peers and a pattern of eating disorders precedes her involvement with modelling by several years.

There is a telling disconnect between the two main parts of the book. For all the emphasis in the early pages on Charli as headstrong rascal, from the time she makes her first contact with the modelling world her character becomes passively compliant.

A steady relationship with a controlling boyfriend continues alongside a perpetually paranoid involvement with her modelling agency and their obsession with her hip measurement. She is mostly a 36 but continually exhorted to shed sufficient pounds to reduce that to 34 – a theme cleverly picked up on by the book’s cover designers.

The book is dedicated “To all the girls who have ever felt their bodies weren’t good enough”. There are no photographs in the book but scrolling far enough down Charli’s Instagram it is possible to discover images from the time when she was starving herself into an unnatural body condition, complete with gauntness of face, hollowed out cheeks and skeletal upper arms.

MISFIT is highly recommended as a good read and as a wake-up-call to others who may, even now, be travelling down a similar road.

It should also be a warning to model agencies and their bookers to be even more selective in their signings, choosing only those individuals who have a realistic prospect of meeting expectations.

Agencies do have a role to play in managing the young people on their books and encouraging them to keep in good shape and condition, but if models are always as terrified of visiting their agent’s offices as Charli suggests, something is very very wrong.

Island

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Nicky Singer, with illustrations by Chris Riddell

Caboodle Books

97809929338963

October 2015

paperback

This very fine novelisation of a successful National Theatre stage play might not have ever been printed. The author’s regular publisher could not see how they might publish such a book successfully (despite its coverage of environmental and sustainability themes that are of vital interest to children and teenagers), so the author decided to seek crowdfunding and finance publication of the book herself. She has written about this on her website.
Caboodle Books have produced Island to a high standard – it ‘looks’ the equal of any mass-produced paperback. Chris Riddell has provided illustrations throughout, waiving his fee/royalties in return for a donation to Greenpeace.
Being an adaptation of a pre-existing stageplay, the book has an atmosphere quite different from most YA fiction.
A teenage boy and his mother arrive on a remote Arctic island. The mother, a research scientist, is there to work. Cameron has been dragged along under protest. The teenager is churlish at the start of the book, not wanting to be there, and missing his various gadgetry comforts. As the book progresses the mother’s character flaw (being so immersed in her work that she is sometimes inconsiderate to those around her) comes more to the fore. It is refreshing to read a YA novel in which not one of the main characters is immediately endearing.
It turns out that the visitors are being watched – by an Inuit girl and her grandmother. The main scenes in the novel – told in very short chapters, mainly between 2 and 4 pages in length – concern the meetings and conversations between Cameron and Inuluk, the Inuit girl.
Cameron has been allowed to bring an iPod and the girl watches him “unspool two long, thin white worms from his jacket pocket and attach one to each ear. The worms seem to alter the boy’s body language.”
Singer is very good at enabling the reader to observe Cameron through the eyes of the two Inuit females. The book is told in the omniscient third person voice and as a reader I felt very much as if I were hovering, godlike, above the affairs the book describes, watching them unfold beneath me – rather than moving along at ground level, beside and amongst the characters.
The writing – both the narrative and the dialogue – is fluent and faultless, as it explores the encounters between Cameron and Inuluk, from their two very different worlds. Although the book is never preacherly or issue driven, young readers cannot fail but ask themselves questions about the world they inhabit as a result of reading it.
There is just the right amount of dramatic ‘adventure’ alongside the quieter, ontological exchanges – especially so towards the book’s finish, as Cameron goes jumping from floating block of ice to floating block of ice and has a climactic confrontation with a polar bear, all engineered by Inuluk’s grandmother, who wants Cameron to experience a sense of awe in the face of a natural, potentially lethal splendour.
Not only did the book deserve to be published, it deserves to get the attention of various award shortlists.

Girl On A Plane

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Miriam Moss

Andersen Press

9781783443314

September 2015

paperback

I was looking forward to reading this book because it came with high recommendations from people whose judgement I respect, but I have to say I feel there is a real and rather fundamental problem with it, and that has to do with the fact that it is, as the author herself tells us in a Postscript “a work of fiction… grounded in a real, life-defining hijack that I experienced when I was fifteen.” She then goes on to give some examples of the detail she invented to help bring this fiction alive. But each thing she mentions is a fairly small amendment to what actually happened on board. In the book the main character sits beside a younger boy whose travelling companion is a terrapin. The boy becomes a significant character in the story, whereas in real life “There was a boy with a terrapin, but I never spoke to him.”
All sense of suspense is rather undermined by the fact that we tend to know the eventual outcome will see the passengers surviving the hijacking, but even so the announcement (well before the end of the book) by the plane’s captain that a deal has been reached comes as an extraordinarily deflating anti-climax. It’s not that we don’t want Anna and everyone else to survive, but in a novel we do expect the tension to ratchet up a little more tautly before it is so suddenly released.
I’m afraid, for me, the book does not work as a novel. Perhaps because of the rawness of those experiences on which it is based, Moss has been too reluctant to reshape what happened into something that could so easily have become a much more edge-of-your-seat reading experience.
It would work very successfully as the basis for a TV drama-documentary about the hijack, in which we accept that we are watching affairs playing out more or less exactly as they happened in real life, but with the usual dramatic license present in such programmes. In that sense it works well as memoir, rather than as a novel, and one that gives the reader an extraordinarily vivid insight into what living through such an experience is actually like.

Goodbye Stranger

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Rebecca Stead

Andersen Press

9781783443192

September 2015

paperback

There is so much to admire in this new book from the author of Liar And Spy, winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. The narration is multi-faceted and subtle. It’s a book that addresses an issue – sexting – and manages to approach it with a sense of proportion and humour. The book is never an issue-driven novel. Stead is extremely clever at using her characters’ dialogue to convey an authorial position on the matters at play in their lives – friendship, family, adolescent love.
And in Bridge, a girl who having cheated death by surviving a serious car accident has just returned to school following several years of recuperation, the author has created a character who cannot fail but enter the reader’s consciousness, wearing, as she does all the time, a headband with a pair of cat’s ears attached.
A passage from near the end of the book that doesn’t contain any plot spoilers, except insofar that it propounds a life view in keeping with the story:

That’s what life is. Life is where you sleep and what you see when you wake up in the morning, and who you tell about your weird dream, and what you eat for breakfast and who you eat it with. Life isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something that you make yourself, all the time. Life is that half minute in the morning before your cat remembers she’s kind of a grouch, when she pours out her love and doesn’t give a flying newton who sees it.

I agree with what a reviewer called Tasha on GoodReads says: “Stead finely captures the feeling of middle school, of just being in the process of changing and growing up, of different people being at various points of maturity both physically and mentally, of meeting new people and maybe being attracted in a different way, and of trying to stay friends through it all. Happily too, it is a book that shows the heart of girls, the bravery of being a modern kid, and the choices that are made. This is not a book that laughs at the antics of pre-teens, but one that celebrates them and this moment in their lives in all of its baffling complexity.”

The Baby

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Lisa Drakeford

Chicken House

9781910002230

July 2015

hardback

The Baby by Lisa Drakeford is one of the best books about the impact of teenage pregnancy I’ve read. The opening is a tour de force, a superbly realistic and well-realised seventeenth birthday party at which things take the normal mildly debauched downhill trajectory culminating, not so normally, in a girl giving birth in the bathroom.

The party is Olivia’s. The girl with the baby is her best friend Nicola.

I don’t normally enjoy books with multiple narrative viewpoints, but this book is masterfully constructed, so that we experience events from one person’s point of view and then move on to another’s. The author doesn’t fall into the trap of switching back and forth, but continues the momentum of the narrative forward in time as she switches from character to character.

Olivia narrates the first section, February. Nicola takes over in March. Then it’s Alice, Olivia’s younger sister’s turn in April. These three sections, forming just over half the length of the novel, are superb.

By the time the two male narrators, Jonty and Ben, take over in May and June, the novel becomes a little less engaging. I think this is partly because they have already been seen through the other narrators’ eyes, partly because the author is less assured in writing in the masculine voice, but mainly because the introduction of an additional ‘issue’ (Ben’s ‘secret’) is an unnecessary loading of concern into a novel which already has Nicola’s teenage pregnancy, Alice’s autism, Jonty’s anger issues and Olivia’s sense of betrayal to contend with.

This is, nevertheless, a book that can be very heartily recommended, and the author’s next novel eagerly awaited.

The Rest Of Us Just Live Here

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Patrick Ness

Walker Books

9781406331165

August 2015

hardback

In its own way this novel is a far more sardonic satire and commentary on the fantasy genre than Mal Peet’s The Murdstone Trilogy, because it is more knowing of contemporary fantasy fashions. The 18th century style italicised chapter prefaces are absolutely hilarious and cumulatively withering in the way they so accurately pastiche the style and narrative content of so much recent fantasy writing.

The main narrative of the novel is also a commentary in itself, being centred on the everyday life and relationships of a group of high school students in the year before graduation. We meet them on the first page “all sprawled together in the field, talking about love and stomachs”.

Narrated by Mikey, a character with high anxiety and periodic bouts of extreme OCD, the story concerns a perfectly ordinary bunch of adolescents very content to be ordinary, and keen to keep their distance from the “indie kids” (dangerous people infected with the sense that extraneous powers, dark and light, are at work in their lives).

“Our town is just like your town,” Mikey is keen for us to know close to the start of the book.

“Me, all I want to do is graduate. And have a last summer with my friends. And go away to college. And (more than) kiss Henna (more than) once. And then get on with finding out about the rest of my life.”

Ness uses a quote from Bjork, to set the tone for the novel. “I thought I could organise freedom. How Scandinavian of me.”

And so Mikey and his family friends pursue their down-to-earth American high school life while dark and foreboding things involving the indie kids go on around them.

This is an excellent and, in the sense that its ideal audience should be those aged about the same as its protagonists, an authentic YA novel. I don’t think the American setting will be off-putting to English readers in the slightest. The dialogue is way too sharp and the relationships between the protagonists far too involving for that to be an issue.

Fire Colour One

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Jenny Valentine

HarperCollins

9780007512362

July 2015

paperback

This is SO good! Absolutely up my street. An economically written YA novel with wryly observed characters and an original storyline that is emotionally engaging to a degree that more overblown, in-your-face writing can never reach.
I want Wes Anderson to discover it and make a movie of it.
Sixteen-year-old Iris has long been estranged from her father, until she is taken from America by her mother and step-father (the shallowness of these two is both mercilessly and totally believably depicted) to visit him on his deathbed.
But not before she has met the most amazing boy called Thurston around whom life becomes magical and positive.
Iris is not a happy teenager. She has taken to lighting fires of various magnitudes.
The tone and story arc of the book cannot be faulted. Valentine is an expert at writing dialogue, and needs to be in the long heart-wrenching scenes between the dying art-expert father and his estranged daughter.
This is what YA fiction used to be like before the days of rampant fantasy and vampire romance.
It has immediately become, like M. T. Anderson’s Feed, one of my favourite young adult novels of all time.
You know, sometimes those straplines speak the truth: “A bold and brilliant novel about love, lies and redemption,” says the back cover. Believe it, buy it, read it.

Pike

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Anthony McGowan

Barrington Stoke

9781781124666

May 2015

hardback

There was a very revealing and self-aware exchange during a brief Q&A feature that the author of this splendid little book completed for the publisher’s website recently, in which he responded to a question about which type of books he preferred writing as follows: “If I have a preference it’s for surreal, gross-out tragi-comedies, like Hellbent, Henry Tumour and Hello Darkness. That way of writing comes very easily to me. I’ve had to make myself write in a more simple, grittily realistic way, for The Knife that Killed Me, Brock and Pike. Strangely, I think this has forced me to produce my best work. Sometimes you find that going against your own grain makes you a better writer.”
Pike is another story about Nicky and Kenny, two characters reminiscent of Stenbeck’s George and Lennie from Of Mice And Men. McGowan first wrote about them in the earlier, highly-popular Brock, and this second tale about them indeed shows Nicky and Kenny bringing the best out of McGowan.
The action takes place mainly around Bacon Pond, a small lake next to a derelict food-processing plant. The atmosphere created is superbly tense and claustrophobic – very different, it has to be said, from the rurally idyllic illustrations that somewhat incongruously decorate the page footers. But that’s beside the point, because it’s the words that make this little story sing and soar, used as they are to create memorable characters and incidents in a manner suggestive that McGowan’s work as a YA writer will become more widely regarded, successful and appreciated in direct proportion to the degree of ‘going against the grain’ future full-length novels share with their little siblings, Brock and Pike.

A Small Madness

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Dianne Touchell

Allen & Unwin

9781760110789

May 2015

paperback

I don’t think I’ve read a book with such intense and compelling emotional momentum since Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade (and that’s going back a bit).
If you want to read an authentically Young Adult book about an unwanted and wilfully denied pregnancy, with a vividly harrowing outcome, then this is that book.
Except in the rawness of its engagement with the reader, it is very different from the novel I compared it with above. Touchell writes as an unfashionable ominiscient all-observing narrator. Her writing is flawless and often verbally exciting in the best poetic sense. But the language is always being used for dramatic purpose, not for decoration. It conveys mood, atmosphere and character.
I could ‘see’ every character in this book extremely vividly.
There are three main characters: The lovers, Rose and Michael, and Rose’s very different friend Liv, who is in some ways the most sympathetic character in the book. But the supporting roles are just as important. Michael’s brother, Tim, and the authoritarian, church-going father. Rose’s mother. Liv’s mother.
It is difficult to write much about the story without giving spoilers – suffice to say that everything that happens is horribly real and believable.
It’s a five-star recommendation for sure.