Young adult fiction that’s smart, sassy and steals the show

Four new young-adult novels delve into theft and its unlikely bedfellows of conscience and compassion.

Supplied Editorial YA novels

Four new young-adult novels delve into theft and its unlikely bedfellows of conscience and compassion. These books feature clever, hardworking girls and boys with diverse, often shady, skills. The girls can also hold their own in the heist stakes.

The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and His Ex (Allen & Unwin, 256pp, $17.99) by bookseller Gabrielle Williams is set atmospherically in Melbourne, with scenes coloured by its quintessential roads, restaurants and workers’ cottages. The novel is cleverly structured, following the four voices silhouetted in the title. Time moves forwards and backwards. The pace slows and quickens like the Yarra River itself to create tension, suspense and release.

Guy lacks marketable talent although he is good at kicking a hacky sack. He’s failing school, has doctored his Year 11 report and is facing the consequences of his parents finding out. He holds a party, which inevitably gets out of control, but his lucky break may be accidentally elbowing an unknown, gorgeous girl in the nose. He is so interested he drives her home even though he doesn’t yet have his licence. Guy’s troubles spiral exponentially on his return trip.

Rafi’s Columbian mother is obsessed by La Llorona, South America’s legendary horse-headed woman. She believes this creature drowned her baby boy. Since his death, Rafi has been diligent and responsible, keeping “the lines straight, the colours coded”, but she makes a terrible mistake while babysitting for her neighbour.

The other two major characters are in their 20s. Luke is a young, successful artist. He gets his ex, Penny, a cool rock chick, pregnant and avoids responsibility for his baby son. All these characters’ lives become entwined.

The plot is loosely based on the true theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman by the so-called Australian Cultural Terrorists in 1986. Luke, his mate Dipper and the ironically named “Real” steal the painting, and Luke paints a forgery.

Julep, in American author Mary Elizabeth Summer’s debut novel Trust Me, I’m Lying (Random House, 336pp, $19.99), also becomes a forger. After spending her youth mastering disguises and scams, she needs to make more money to pay her rent and school fees, so she starts a successful sideline forging IDs.

Life is complicated by the disappearance of her father. Julep fears he has been taken by the mob. She finds the first of a trail of clues in the rubbish bin of their trashed apartment. In a padded envelope are a gun and a cryptic note, “Beware the field of miracles”. This sets her off on a scavenger hunt, including a Chaucerian set piece where she wears an orange wig and overalls that cover a waiter’s suit, to a private club to locate a locker. The disguises and decoys escalate as she escapes.

Sam, son of the wealthiest African-American in Chicago and a technophile who is capable of hacking into the FBI, helps Julep. He is one of two love interests. Minor characters, particularly those who Julep’s scams or “fixes”, are interesting. Murphy wants to take Bryn to the formal and, once transformed with a geek-chic makeover, strikes “while the irony’s hot” and later becomes a useful ally.

The author expertly jostles humour, anger, fear and compassion to build the plot as well
as the characters. Julep is an unusual grifter. Even though she has a smart voice, isn’t demonstrative and needs personal space, she wants to be “real” and cares for others more than herself. Despite being a liar, Julep is a girl to be trusted.

Chester in Melbourne author Skye Melki-Wegner’s first stand-alone novel, The Hush (Random House, 448pp, $19.99), is reluctant to trust the gang who saves him from beheading in the town of Hamelin. He is on a mission to find his missing father and chafes at being seconded as an unlicensed Songshaper to help them pull off a heist.

They are also unsure of him even without knowing he is inadvertently connecting to the “Song” when he plays his fiddle or flute. This is blasphemy in a place where the Song is the heartbeat of the world and holds it together.

When the story begins, Chester sees the world as a treble clef. “A hill curved high on the horizon. A swirl of ink. A symbol on a song sheet.” Dot, whose female lover has also vanished, is a Songshaper-mechanic in the Nightfall Gang, a notorious band that steals from the rich to feed the poor. The gang travels in an echoship, a steampunk boat with masts and flapping sails, which hovers above the ground. It is jump-started by the music of trains. When the engine dangerously runs a semitone off-key, the group resets it by playing from a manual of sheet music. Music is the essence of this world, the core of its original composition and accompaniments.

Athletic, red-haired burglar Susannah is the captain of the gang. She is a fugitive from the Conservatorium of Music and needs Chester to complete her team for their most audacious theft yet, stealing from the Conservatorium. They travel through the parallel world of the Hush to evade capture. The Hush is a secret place. It is dark and foggy, with rain that falls as shadow rather than water. Its air is musically contaminated and it conceals dangerous, tainted creatures called Echoes.

Another imagined world where song is pivotal is Magonia, created by Maria Dahvana Headley (HarperCollins, 320pp, $19.99), who has co-edited an anthology with Neil Gaiman. The story is established securely in the real world where Aza’s “history is hospitals” because she has a rare lung disease. There’s a rumour at school that she resembles “a hungry, murdery girl ghost from a Japanese horror movie” because of her pale face and blue lips but she’s actually matter-of-fact and sardonic. Her best friend, and dual narrator, is genius Jason, who has suddenly become hot even though he wears mismatched clothes and pyjama tops and deals with his anxiety through philosophy, pills and reciting pi.

They share an appreciation of EE Cummings’s poetry, which inspires them to write important messages with brackets and parentheses, “(I { } you more than [[[{{{ }}}]]].)”. They also draw lines through words they need to use but that have too much baggage, such as love.

When Aza dies but wakes in an airship in the sky-country of Magonia, the feather in her lung becomes a yellow bird that passes through a door in her chest. Aza is the saviour of Magonia who was “born to sing the elements into submission” and steal Earth’s food crops with her lungsinger bird and handsome, arrogant first mate, Dai. Magonia seems to be a glorious place with squallwhales, which make camouflage storms, and batsails, sails of giant tethered bats, but there are also stormsharks, pirates, food shortages and impending war with Earth.

Both speculative and realist literature can help young readers deal with difficult issues such as living with loss and death in compelling and relevant ways. These books have characters who are trying to improve their worlds. As Jason tells Aza: “Even people who’ve never seen the light, people who’ve been kept in the dark … people who’ve never seen a miracle can believe in miracles.”