A thriller set during a pandemic may, understandably, be the absolute last thing many readers wish to leap into, still haunted by the last few years in which people turned “practically feral, having forgotten how to behave around other human beings”.
But Crown Royale, the (fictional, fortunately) new coronavirus variation propelling Neal Shusterman’s All Better Now (Walker Books, £8.99) promises to be a different kind of disease. Yes, there is a 4 per cent death rate among those infected – but those who survive are kinder, better, more empathetic people. Billionaires give up their wealth. The system begins to crack. If everything is about to dissolve – isn’t that for the best? Isn’t it, really, what this too cruel, too hard world needs?
Shusterman is the most recent recipient of the prestigious Margaret A Edwards Award, cited for a range of novels that demonstrate to teenagers “even in a world that does not always take them seriously or trust them, they have the capacity to create a better, brighter and more hopeful future”.
In this latest book, the teen characters are at the heart of the moral dilemmas – while one gifted, ambitious girl has been tasked with developing a counter-virus, and granted the power and means to do so, a formerly suicidal boy seeks to spread his newfound contentment with as many people as he can, becoming a superspreader of the virus.
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This is a smart, thought-provoking novel with no easy answers. While it offers up topical commentary – “The beauty of disinformation was that the more outlandish it was, the more people would believe it, because it was fed by the public’s own paranoia. Amazing how easy it was to cast a fishhook out into the collective consciousness, and watch people take the bait, then writhe and flail on the line.” – it also resists an easy parallel with specific events in our world.
The best speculative fiction serves as a mirror, but an imperfect one; in a 500-page adventure we need more than a simple fable to sustain us. We need unexpected twists and swerves, and ethical questions to chew on, and Shusterman absolutely delivers in yet another superb book for young readers.
The unsettled horror of this decade’s opening also shapes Libba Bray’s Under The Same Stars (Atom, £20), an engaging and sophisticated mystery that sees teenagers in 2020 New York devote part of their lockdown learning time to investigating the disappearance of two teenage girls during the second World War.
As with Shusterman, we are in excellent hands here; Bray’s past work includes stylish historical fiction (including an utterly delicious Victorian boarding school trilogy), often with the supernatural woven in. In this book, though, magic is a metaphor, with fairytales used as a way into the harder things to talk about; there are pleasing echoes of Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose.
The reliance on archetypes also allows for comparisons between the past and present to slide in neatly, trusting the reader to get it: “There was a mad king whose heart was a wizened lump inside his chest. The king was a tyrant.”
In three different timelines – the early 1940s in a small German village, 1980 in a still-divided Berlin, and 2020 in a troubled US – we see different kinds of oppression, and ways to resist it, terrifying though they may be. There is hope even in the darkness, even in an era where everything feels too much. (“I look around at everything – climate change, all the shootings, everybody screaming at each other on the internet – and ... it just feels daunting. Hopeless.”) If tyranny has always existed, so too has its downfall.
Kel Menton was already a writer to watch, but their fiction debut underlines it
The magic in Irish playwright Kel Menton’s debut novel A Fix of Light (Little Island, £8.99) operates on both a metaphorical and literal level. When Hanan meets an intriguing stranger, Pax, it soothes something in his troubled soul. “Relief flowed from the point where the fox boy’s skin brushed his own. Cool water on feverish skin. The first bite of a meal sliding into an empty stomach. Weight alleviated from tired feet.” This immediate connection with Pax doesn’t translate into an easy friendship, but after a stumble or two they get closer, with a sparky attraction dancing up from the pages.
Both boys have their secrets and past traumas, sensitively handled, and Menton slips in some pleasingly precise lines on enduring pain: “Carry on like you’re not sick, and you won’t feel sick any more,” Hanan reminds himself after his mother lectures him about how medication alone is not enough, that “making an effort” is required. “But it took all his strength to keep living, sucking in one lungful of air after another. Living asked too much of him.” Beneath the mundane world of diagnoses lies the faerie one, and questions Hanan has about the night he tried to die – and the powers he’s had since then – may be answered there.
More magical realism than urban fantasy, the supernatural elements occasionally feel like a distraction or easy way out of tough issues, but at their best serve as a way to heighten the characters’ emotional realities – Pax’s shape-shifting abilities allow for a brilliant exploration of identity and belonging, for example. Menton was already a writer to watch, but their fiction debut underlines it.
Fox-like creatures also turn up in Polly Crosby’s The Vulpine (Scholastic, £8.99), a dystopian tale in which Imperfect children are separated from their parents at birth. The Hospital, citizens are told, will take care of them; the alternative is the terrifying underground lair of the predatory Vulpine, subject of many a child’s nightmare. When teenage Ora discovers her own long-hidden genetic illness, it’s the first step towards joining these rebellious monsters herself.
This is a particularly smart look at what chronic health conditions and disabilities really mean, and the extent to which societies might design systems with a range of abilities in mind – or not. Crosby avoids didacticism here, but there’s plenty of food for thought, as well as a realistically nuanced pack of characters to root for.
“The cruellest fate the gods and stars had ever written: the person I loved most in the world was the person who would ultimately destroy me.” Having explored dark fantasy tropes in her recent YA titles, Laura Steven expands her canvas dramatically in Our Infinite Fates (Penguin, £16.99), a sweeping reincarnation romance in which two lovers rediscover one another, life after life – and then one inevitably murders the other just before they turn 18.
Evelyn and Arden have been locked in this battle for more than a thousand years. In this life, she has an adorable, ill younger sister she wants to save – and needs to survive past her birthday in order to donate the bone marrow that will make that possible. With the clock ticking, she must find whoever Arden is today (that strange new boy in town? The quiet girl at the bookshop?), and persuade him, somehow, to let her live.
The quick-paced forward momentum of the present day is interspersed with exotic flashes of centuries past, variations of their love story and eventual mutual destruction playing around in an evocative range of settings. Dramatically satisfying and addictively swoony – a book to pick up and inhale in one delicious gulp.
