September is birthday season in my family. My littlest sister and brother were born three years and three days apart and this year they turned sixteen and nineteen, maybe the ultimate teenage years, the one right in the heart of what we think of as teenhood, the other on the cusp of leaving it. The same sister once told me that adults can’t write books about teenagers, that they’ve already lost the rhythm of it, the rules, the coherent nonsense of it all. Bowing to her wishes, I have mostly avoided young adult fiction in the following recs: instead these are novels of adults remembering, or peering into that divide, or scrambling back for the feeling, even if they have long since been evicted from that strange city.
I loved Raven Leilani’s debut and newly released novel, LUSTER, for many reasons: its forensic and grotty-sexy interest in the appeal of shitty white men; its brutal and brilliant heroine Edie, whose razor sharp narration sends you hurtling through the novel and who is much weirder than she appears at first sight; its wry and unflinching send-up of the publishing industry and of white women. But my favourite part of a favourite novel for the year was Akila, the adopted Black daughter of the white man Edie is sleeping with, who is tender-hearted and grumpy, nerdy and mean, neglected by her parents and brave in startling and tragic ways because of it. She is twelve, on the brink of teenhood, twitching between childhood and this next thing. When Edie starts exploring the house of these affluent and assured white people it is all parodic bourgeoisie life, until she gets to Akila’s room, a tiny haven of weirdness complete with a notebook filled with “pages upon pages of Batman fan fiction… [which] is pretty good”. I ended up eating my heart out over nearly every one of LUSTER’s characters but it is Akila I think about most, Akila who I hope is doing okay.
(buy @ indiebound)Did you know that Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh! - wrote a novel about the Emperor Constantine’s mother, her life in Roman Britain, her conversion to Christianity, and her eventual pilgrimage to Palestine where she apparently found the True Cross? No? Me either until I stumbled upon it by complete accident, but hey, HELENA exists and it is as bizarre and lovely as you would hope. Grave and quiet, as invested in Helena as an old woman as it is in her youth, HELENA is the 3rd century told as though it was the 20th, a lovingly anachronistic piece of writing with a deep, cool heart that rings true as iron or an heirloom that you press down into each generation’s waiting palm. Helena grows up quite quickly over the course of the novel but, to suit our theme, my favourite part is the first few chapters, the dreamy princess who listens to the Iliad as though it is a soap opera and falls in love in a British landscape just familiar enough to be beautiful, just alien enough to be frightening.
(buy any number of old editions, with excellent covers, on ebay)Nobody seems to be quite able to decide which genre Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s SKIM belongs to: my copy has a list of awards on the back that range from Best Illustrated Children’s Book to Young Adult Book of the Year to Best Publication for Tweens to Best Books of the Year. It seems notable then that the main audience for this slim, nasty graphic novel is people who like good things. The sulky heroine, Skim herself (called so “because I’m not”), is just trying to make it through high school with whatever she can grab: witchcraft, bad friends, an affair with her favourite teacher, goths, clubs. It is a novel full of sharp edges, bitter twists, wrestling with queerness and power. Reading it feels like curling your lip, sinking into all that furious and lonely teenage disdain.
(buy @ indiebound)Remember when the second wave of Call Me By Your Name discourse hit and everyone was like, wait, is this book problematic? Skip the confusion (and the purple prose) and head straight for Sybille Bedford’s A COMPASS ERROR, one of the nastiest and sexiest books I have ever read. Set in the 1920s, it stars Flavia, spending her seventeenth summer alone in the south of France, and Andrée, the older woman who seduces Flavia competently and mercilessly — for her own reasons. It’s a sweltering, tense book, one to read with your breath hitched high up in your lungs, sex that feels so entangled with dominance you almost forget what else could exist, a love story that unfolds like a horror movie: look around, she’s right behind you. Andrée is fearless and cruel, reaching out a fist and managing to beckon with it. “I’d do anything you want me to,” Flavia tells her, and Andrée responds, a little bored, “That’s what people say. Do you want me to take advantage of it?” Of course, Flavia says yes. So would I. So, I bet, would you. At the very least, give yourself the chance to decide.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)ALSO CONSIDER: Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, too obvious a rec for me to devote a whole paragraph to it but as perfect as everyone says it is all the same; “what’s good, hot on the cement kid/White Castle kid/tongue stained purple/cussin on the court”; the Boris & Theo sections of the Goldfinch, of course, for teenage dysfunction at its best; Holden sneaking into his little sister’s room to talk to her; a selection of the best Australian YA: Melina Marchetta, Jaclyn Moriarty, Alice Pung, Nina Kenwood; “I almost/don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum”; a classic tune.