teenage fiction Archives - Page 33 of 57

This is my sixth Top Ten Tuesday post. Top Ten Tuesday was created and is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is “Top Ten Books I’d Recommend To Someone Who Doesn’t Read X“, and I decided to entitle my list:

Top Ten Books I’d Recommend To Someone Who Doesn’t Read British YA

I wasn’t sure at first what to choose as my ‘X’. I don’t consider myself expert enough on the subject of YA in general to pick ten books out for someone who isn’t a fan already, but then I remembered that I have a much longer history with British YA than with just YA in general – going all the way back to when I was an actual teenager!

As much as I love reading about all the things they have in the USA that we don’t have here, like alternative high schools and proms and New York, British YA (or ‘teen fiction’ as it is more commonly known here) is my favourite. Opening up a book in which young people spell colour with an ‘u’, go charity shopping (not thrifting), heap scorn upon (or secretly love) The X Factor, and/or drink tea more often than coffee feels like coming home. Fictional British teenagers are also much more likely than fictional American teenagers to go to house parties/sneak into nightclubs and get drunk. FACT. Plus (mostly thanks to Sarra Manning) we have the hottest hot indie/art boys!

So if you like bad behaviour and British slang, read on, and read more British YA/teen fiction! Most of these are contemporary, because that’s what I read (and write) most of the time, but I’ve tried really hard to pick out a couple that aren’t.

1. Let’s Get Lost, by Sarra Manning
Isabel is the Queen of Mean at her school, and is determined to stay at the top, even after her mother dies. Then one night at a party, she meets Smith, a ridiculously drunk student who mistakes her for his friend, and everything starts to change. I am planning to re-read and review this book soon, I keep thinking about it. (Okay, now I have retrieved it from its usual shelf and put it on my TBR, hehe)

2. Della Says: OMG, by Keris Stainton
Della gets asked out by her crush, but then the next day, she discovers that her diary (in which she was constantly writing about how much she fancied him) is missing. She gets a Facebook message with a photo of one of the most embarrassing pages, but she doesn’t know who’s got it. I enjoyed this so much, and am considering re-reading it soon as well!

3. Hard Cash/Moving Out, by Kate Cann
Kate Cann is really, really good at writing convincing teenage boys. Moving Out, originally titled Hard Cash, is the first in a trilogy told from the point of view of Rich, a broke art student, who is fed up of living with his similarly-poor parents and is in lust with posh Portia. Kate Cann is also well known for the Coll and Art trilogy, and Fiesta is a great summer book, I’ve read it several times. I also enjoyed Leader of the Pack.

4. French Letters and French Leave, by Eileen Fairweather
Okay, if you’re not British or know nothing about the Eighties you may not understand half of the references in this pair of novels. But that’s okay, because there are SO MANY jokes that there will still be plenty left for you. Maxine Harrison is a girl who decides that it’s a good idea to tell her French penpal that her dad is the Head of London Transport, when actually he’s a bus conductor. Then he announces that he’s coming to visit.

5. Noughts & Crosses, by Malorie Blackman
In a world dominated by the dark-skinned Crosses, a rich Cross girl and a poor pale-skinned Nought boy dare to be best friends and maybe fall in love. A gripping and devastating thriller.

6. Extreme Kissing, by Luisa Plaja
I read this a couple of years ago, and I don’t know why I haven’t reviewed it yet! It’s a really fun story about best friends Bethany and Carlotta, and a madcap day out in London that changes everything. The twist at the end I did not see coming, and I keep remembering it and thinking how genius it was.

7. The Diary Of A Crush Trilogy, by Sarra Manning
Because although, objectively, they’re not as good as Let’s Get Lost, or Nobody’s Girl, once you fall in love with Dylan you will never be the same again. Art boys forever!

8. Girl Meets Cake, by Susie Day
Another one with loads of cute boys, Girl Meets Cake is a light-hearted read about a girl who invents an imaginary boyfriend to make herself seem cooler. All goes well until her friends start sending him messages, and she starts getting e-mails from someone calling himself Mysterious E.

9. Witch Child, by Celia Rees
This was a bestseller when I was a teen. It’s about a girl in the 17th Century called Mary who has to leave her home after her grandmother is found guilty of witchcraft. She goes to America with the Puritans, but finds herself in trouble when people in her new town start accusing her of being a witch.

10. Night School, by C. J. Daughterty
This is cheating somewhat as it’s the last book I read! Middle-class miscreant Allie is sent to a posh British boarding school, where at first everything seems very elegant and proper, but secrets abound.

Interview with Malorie Blackman at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2011.

Callum and Sephy have been best friends ever since they were small children. Callum is a light-skinned Nought, poor, underprivileged, living in a small house with his parents and elder brother and sister. Sephy is a dark-skinned Cross, the daughter of a wealthy politician, living in an enormous mansion with her parents and sister. Their mothers were friends once, yet now they’re not supposed to see each other, and so for the last few years, Sephy and Callum have been meeting in secret.

Now Callum has won a place at Sephy’s school, with a few other Noughts, and Sephy is delighted. She doesn’t understand why Callum might be nervous, why he gets angry when she talks to him in public, even when she gets in trouble. Callum is worried, not only because the other Noughts at school are dropping out, but because his brother might be getting involved with terrorists. Will Callum and Sephy ever understand each other? Will they even survive long enough to be happy?

The first thing I have to say about Noughts & Crosses is that it’s definitely a thriller. I was gripped right from the start and I barely put it down in the couple of days it took me to read it, but then it took me several more days to recover from the ending, I was so shaken and generally depressed by it. Needless to say, if you like uplifting reads, this might not be for you. If you like to be absorbed by a book and to spend time figuring out how you feel about the characters and their choices, then I think you should pick up Noughts & Crosses.

Being a thriller, it’s fairly light on the description, but we still get to know the two central characters well as they narrate alternating chapters. Most of the other characters remain quite enigmatic, but I don’t think that’s a problem. Sephy and Callum are children/teenagers so their parents, siblings, and teachers wouldn’t explain things to them all the time, or talk to them about what’s troubling them.

I really liked that the differences between Sephy and Callum weren’t as simple as one being a rich Cross, and the other being a poor Nought. Although Sephy is immature and spoilt, like everyone assumes she is, her parents marriage is falling apart, and she isn’t close to any of her family members. Callum, on the other hand, starts off as a member of a tight-knit family group, and it’s his family loyalties that lead him to make bad decisions.

The one thing that bothered me about Noughts & Crosses is that the culture is exactly the same as our present one in the UK. An alternate history was hinted at a few times, to explain why Crosses were dominant. In this history, Africans, rather than Europeans, had spread out across the world, pillaging and colonising, and if this had happened, the unnamed country in Noughts & Crosses probably wouldn’t have the same political system as the UK with the Queen and Prime Minister, people probably wouldn’t be spending pounds, important people probably wouldn’t wear suits, black probably wouldn’t be worn to funerals and so on. Maybe the author thought that flipping black and white was enough of a change and that altering the world of the story too much would alienate readers, and she didn’t want to get bogged down in the details that an alternate history novel would demand, but a few imaginative changes could have made the world much more vivid and interesting for me.

I wouldn’t recommend Noughts & Crosses if you’re looking for a detailed alternate history, but I would recommend it generally to anyone looking for an absorbing read. It’s a novel about racism, seeing things from both sides, the fact that things are far from black and white (expressed beautifully as we see how different characters interpret and react to the same situation), and most interestingly, growing up.

Who grows up the most in the novel? I actually think it’s Sephy, though she’s by far the most immature character for most of the story. Callum only goes so far in maturing, and then he sort of abandons the notion of seeing the world in its true complexity, though he never goes as far as his brother Jude. If you’ve read Noughts & Crosses, what do you think?

Noughts & Crosses is the first in a four-part series of novels. The edition I read also included the short story ‘An Eye for an Eye’, which is set after the events in Noughts & Crosses, but before the sequel, Knife Edge. The other two books are Checkmate and Double Cross.

See also: Get Writing with Malorie Blackman – a video recorded for BBC Blast filmed in one of my local libraries and on the high street! (I got so excited over this, because I am a nerd)

teenage fiction

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