Being by Kevin Brooks

 

2007 

Fostered sixteen-year old Robert Smith goes for a routine endoscopy and things go badly wrong.

The novel is a car chase from the very beginning. Short sentences and frequent line-breaks maintain a fast pace. Kevin Brooks keeps us guessing all of the time. The pace slows later as the story turns to romance and sex. 

Robert tells his own story in a first person immediate narrative that as so often in books written for young adults makes the reader feel as though the narrator is their best friend and is telling their story in order to work what has happened. 

Is it a thriller? Is it a science fiction?  There is violence and Robert takes risks. There are also elements of the thriller in this novel.  

There is something odd about Robert and the reader is left to find her own explanation. 

The fast pace and the thriller elements in the first part of the story make it seem suitable for teens. 

The content in the latter half of the book brings it more firmly into the YA area.                  

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

 

2015 

The monster in the title takes many forms. It is an ancient spirit in a Yew tree, a nightmare, cancer, death, illness, humanity, a caring grandmother, an almost always absent father, a group of bullies and the protagonist himself, Conor.

The concept was created by Siobhan Dowd, but sadly she died of breast cancer before she could start writing. The task was taken on by Patrick Ness but he made no attempt to replicate Dowd's voice.   

    

This is a brave novel. It tackles many young adult themes – peer pressure, family relationships, bullying and school. There is a touch of the paranormal too in the story. It also brings us face-to-face with death and illness; some of the descriptions of Conor's mother's illness are quite graphic. 

Conor is not altogether likeable yet Ness manages to make us empathise with him. 

In the end, it is up to the reader to decide exactly who or what the monster is.  For sure, it brings some wisdom and poses many questions.                     

The Hit by Melvin Burgess

                                                    

 

 

2013

Melvin Burgess as he often does here offers a serious of challenges. In this story we have drug-taking, sex, death, risk-taking, social unrest and extreme violence.  Burgess pushes boundaries again:  much of the violence is premeditated and calculated.  

This suits the YA reader well:  my own research establishes that this genre, if you can call it a genre, is often multi-themed. 

The novel is also what publishers might call "high concept". The story centres around Death, a drug that gives users a week-long high. At the end of the week the user dies.  The young adults who take the drug also create a bucket-list of many risk-taking activities they want to enjoy.

Again as we might expect from a YA text, this novel is in effect a bildungsroman. Protagonist Adam learns to value life. The ending is upbeat but uncertain.  There is hope for Adam and his friends.  

Burgess has also created believable characters with whom we can easily empathize. 

This is a book with a thick spin and some 304 pages. It has the narrative balance we would expect in  a novel written for an adult.                       

Thornhill by Pam Smy

Thornhill by Pam Smy

2017

This is a very tactile book and quite heavy. I t tells two parallel stories. One is in normal prose.  The other  is told in black and white pictures.  

The pictures to some extent work the same way as they do in a picture book for pre-school children; there is more story in the pictures, though here it could be argued it is a supplementary story rather than an extended story. The eye is drawn from left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom.  Double spreads create drama.

The text is formatted raged right and this may suggest it is suitable for an emergent reader.   However, if follows a normal story arc. The font has a serif and the difficult a and g.   

It may also be suitable for the teen reader :  it contains the themes of peer pressure and bullying.  In these two stories adults let the protagonists down.  The prose story includes a first person narrative and reads like a diary. The story in pictures contains a newspaper article.  The reader needs to have a sophisticated level of understanding.

The first person narrative may also make the books suitable for young adults.  There is a high emotional engagement with the girl who writes the diary. There is also a shock element: was Ella burnt alive?  

Above all else, this is a beautiful book and I can quite understand why it was short-listed for the 2018 Greenaway medal.