Fiction for teenagers – reviews

Thriller momentum is combined with burning real-life issues – from school bullying to female genital mutilation – in this crop of teen fiction

A Somali girl is threatened with FGM in What Was Never Said. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Geraldine Brennan

Sunday 12 April 2015 The Guardian

When fleeing from zombies or vampires through a dystopian landscape into a parallel universe, or removing the alternate self from your brain cells, sometimes you long to get back to basics. These choices are all set firmly in the real world (give or take the odd ghost), exploring the diehard concerns of identity, family values, relationships and bullying in tried-and-tested fictional formats.
Jessica’s Ghost by Andrew Norriss (David Fickling Books £10.99) arrives 18 years after Norriss’s Whitbread (now Costa) award-winning story, Aquila. Now, as then, he tells an apparently simple tale with skill. The story of Francis, a would-be fashion designer who retreats from unhappy school life into a friendship with a dead girl whose wardrobe is limitless, has hidden depths. Its contemplation of the isolation of artists and the true nature of popularity will appeal to a wide age range.

Tim Bowler: it’s fun. It’s joyous. It’s life affirming. Reading is great!

Another bully-victim standoff provides the trigger for a classic urban teen thriller, Night Runner by Tim Bowler (Oxford University Press £6.99). Hero Zinny’s predicaments – an accidental brush with organised crime, a desperately poor home life, flawed parents with dirty secrets – are shared by many of his fictional peers. Zinny is on the run, as most young people in thrillers are, but he runs into trouble rather than away from it when he is forced to become a courier for the baddies. The narrative rockets along like one of Zinny’s routes through the mean streets in the small hours, helped by Tim Bowler’s superb descriptive powers. He is skilled at conveying bleakness and terror, while in the nick of time saving his nihilistic scenarios from becoming overwhelming. Zinny seems to have no hope, being afraid to accept the help he is offered, but finds salvation in his treasured book of nature photographs.

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