Teenage fiction reviewed

Sarah Singleton is becoming a major novelist in the teenage fiction scene, with The Amethyst Child (Simon & Schuster, £6.99) her best achievement yet. It describes how intelligent, 15-year-old Amber meets Dowdie, her first ever close friend, living close by in an experimental community. Delighted by the new sense of freedom she finds there, Amber becomes impatient with her well-meaning but earthbound parents. But like Shaw's Major Barbara, she makes the painful discovery that the group she likes so much is secretly funded by the arms trade. Worse, its charismatic leader James possesses his own private arsenal. Sometimes demanding, but in the best possible way, this excellent novel is thoughtful and gripping.

Linda Newbery is another author who never lets her readers down. Refusing to be hurried and eschewing cheap cliff-hanging effects, her gentle novel Flightsend (David Fickling, £10.99) tells how 15-year-old Charlie copes with living in the deep countryside with a mother suffering from depression. Badly missing her quasi-step father, from whom her mother has split, Charlie puts her life together while beating off the attentions of an amorous art teacher. There is plenty in this emotionally wise novel for readers to think about; her mother ends up more cheerful, too, giving a happier ending than at one time seemed possible.

Jenny Valentine's first novel, Finding Violet Park, was a knockout. Her second, Broken Soup (HarperCollins, £5.99), is nearly if not quite so good. Also featuring a terminally depressed mother looked after by her heroic adolescent daughter Rowan, this novel is dominated by the absence of idealised older brother Jack, dead in a drowning accident. The under-age death rate in teenage fiction is much greater than in real life, and some may find the obsessive grief trying, as if the miserabilist tendency doing so well in the adult market is now ensconced in novels for adolescents too. But a laid-back American boyfriend helps restore Rowan's high spirits, with a nice surprise twist at the end.

In contrast, Anthony McGowan's The Knife That Killed Me (Definitions, £5.99) offers a roller-coaster of violent emotions, ending on a hideous mass fight with no happy ending. Its narrator, 15-year-old Paul, goes to one of those fictional schools that sound more like a Young Offenders' Institution. It's loosely based, we are told, on the author's experience at a Catholic comprehensive in Manchester: let's hope McGowan sends its current head a copy, just in case any of the same horrible teachers and bullying still exist. But given that 11 teenagers in London alone have been killed this year, mostly knifed to death, the timeliness of this urgently written if deeply depressing novel cannot be faulted.

Less is at stake in Sophie McKenzie's Three's a Crowd (Simon & Schuster, £5.99), where testosterone-charged teenage Luke suffers agonies of jealousy on holiday in Spain with his beautiful if somewhat vapid girlfriend, Eve. The cause is Eve's equally macho hotel-owning absentee father, who does everything to make Luke's stay hard. Eventually, Luke realises that he and this overbearing patriarch have too much in common, and slowly begins to re-think his relationships. Sometimes over-intense, this well-constructed novel still has much going for it.

Teenage fantasy fiction tends to be as beleaguered as its realist counterparts these days, with Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (Walker, £12.99) setting a high standard in an already crowded genre. Adolescent Todd, living in a dismal, all-male society transported to a new planet, hates his life there. Every thought he and others have can be heard in a general roar of continuous noise. This makes it impossible for anyone to keep secrets, but Todd manages to escape.

After that he is a wanted transgressor, but finds he cannot kill those who want to kill him - since then their message of violence would have won. Backed up by Viola, a girl from yet another planet, Todd struggles with his conscience as well as all the physical obstacles on his way to a new start in a more civilised community. With two more books to come, he and Viola clearly have many more arduous adventures in store. Impressively thought through, travelling at a great pace, Ness's first novel for a young adult audience is a fine start.