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.                       

George by Alex Gino

                                                     

  

2015

George thinks as herself as a girl even though she was born a boy. She feels awkward using the boys' toilets. She longs to play the part of Charlotte in  the school production of Charlotte's Web.   

All of her life, however, she has been assigned male gender and she has a penis. She collects pictures of girls in pretty swim wear - not because as a boy she is turned on by this - she is after all only a fourth-grader -  but because as a girl she wants to look like the people in the pictures.

The narrator uses the pronoun “she” right from the beginning but older brother Scott calls George “little bro’”. Her best friend Kelly seems quite accepting of her wanting to take the part of Charlotte but her words “Who cares if you’re not really a girl?” (26) injure George.  Kelly is keen to support her friend’s plans but completely misunderstands the situation. She reminds George that men have traditionally played women in theatre before, especially in Shakespeare’s time.

George has to go through the ordeals of confessing her status to her best friend and to her mother.  Reactions are somewhat hostile at first.

However, the story ends on a high, though she has taken just one small step and must continue to take one step at a time.