Teen fiction reviews: Dreamworlds and dystopias

DO teenagers feel festive? Would they admit it to us if they did? The Christmas round-up is always going to be difficult because, honestly, there are so few festive-friendly books published for this age group.

But as a gift you wouldn’t go far wrong with Steampunk! (Walker Books, £9.99), a collection of 14 stories exploring the retro-futuristic genre of the title. Garth Nix, Holly Black, Kelly Link and MT Anderson are perhaps the big-name contributors, but each of the stories brings something fun and imaginative, splicing the near-past, the once-future and the not-quite-today. Don’t be fooled into thinking this one’s just for boys – there’s plenty for fans of dark romance to enjoy too. All in all, an exciting and expansive collection, with some stories short enough to be read during the Queen’s Speech.

Marcus Sedgewick (pictured inset) is fast becoming a genre unto himself – not quite gothic, not quite fantasy, not quite horror. Midwinterblood (Indigo, £9.99) may not be the cosy, festive ghost story we expect at Christmas, but it’s an eerily atmospheric tale perfect for curling up with on a cold December evening. It’s a novel of seven interconnected stories moving backwards in time, to pinpoints in the history of Blessed Isle – a gloomy, rocky, far northern habitation.

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Beginning with Eric, a journalist in 2027 sent to the island to uncover any truth behind the myth that the childless residents never age nor die, he meets a beautiful woman, Merle, whom he feels he’s met sometime before. And of course he has. The stories lead back through their past lives (or past connections) as far as ancient times when they were King and Queen of this spit of land. Yet we always fear it will not end, or even begin, happily.

In Nothing (Strident, £7.99) by Danish writer Janne Teller, Pierre Anthon leaves school and goes to sit all day in a plum tree because he says he’s come to the realisation that nothing matters, life has no meaning. From his perch he hurls both plums and existential abuse at his classmates.

They can’t agree with him, and wanting to prove him wrong they build a “heap of meaning” in the old sawmill.

It starts simply enough with a favourite bicycle or a coveted pair of shoes, but each friend gets to choose what the next has to add to the heap, guessing what they will find hardest to forsake and therefore choosing what has most meaning. Soon the teenagers are giving up pets, holy idols, dead little brothers, virginity… Disturbing, challenging, compulsive, unique, terrific. And impossible to forget – which perhaps should be taken as both praise and warning.

If it’s not sex and swearing causing concern for the gatekeepers of teenage fiction, it must be blasphemy. Meg Rosoff’s There Is No Dog (Penguin, £12.99) has already hit the headlines after Rosoff was banned from attending an author event at a Catholic school in Bath.

In her novel she imagines the creator as a sex-obsessed teenage boy called Bob, who didn’t particularly want the job and got bored after only a week anyway. Hence the problem that our world doesn’t always work in the way we’d all like it to. Luckily Bob’s PA, flatmate and general dogsbody, Mr B, is on hand to help out where he can, but even he’s struggling when Bob falls in love with mortal zookeeper Lucy.

It’s an imaginative and intelligent book, perhaps not as playful as the blurb suggests, but Rosoff has mischievous fun poking that old, cantankerous beast Belief with a pointy stick.

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Continuing the current trend for dystopian fiction is Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (Atom, £6.99). Approximately 100 years from now the icecaps have melted, sea levels have risen and governments have broken down. The world is run by competing, economically driven clans. Nailer lives on what was the southern coast of America, a few days journey from Old New Orleans. He’s a ship breaker, crawling through the dank ducts and shafts of the great beached hulks of dead tankers, peeling away precious copper wire for his crew boss to sell. All crew members dream of a lucky strike, of a forgotten barrel of oil that could make them rich. Nailer’s unexpected find comes in the form of a stranded rich girl. He could give her up, hand her over to his drugged and vicious father. But where would the adventure be in that? And this is adventure of the highest order.