3 New Books About Teenage Angst That’ll Make You Grateful for Adulthood
This Friday marked the official date of the Harry Potter epilogue, and thousands gathered to wish our favorite teen saga well as it rode off into the sunset on Platform 9 ¾. Well, something about the trials and tribulations of teenagehood must stay with us, because books about adolescent angst and teen survival against all odds are always popular. Teenage life can represent the powerlessness we feel when we’re facing one of those cruel, impenetrable systems seemingly designed to make us fail. It can also represent coming into oneself, developing a resolute moral compass despite the easier alternative. These three new book club novels all present teen protagonists trying to get through life and maintain friendships through their changing lives.
<em>My Absolute Darling</em>
Turtle (or Julia) Alveston is a 14-year-old girl who, thanks to her father, is not only a survivor but also a survivalist, living in the woods of Northern California and training with guns and knives for her father’s imagined end-of-the-world scenarios. Her father is far more immediately dangerous than the future he presents though; charismatic and controlling, he’s isolated Turtle since the death of her mother, and, to no-one’s surprise, that control manifests itself in emotional, physical, and sexual violence.
<em>The Burning Girl</em>
“It’s a different story depending on where you start: who’s good, who’s bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren’t anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.” A different teenaged Julia stars in Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl. Everything always seems so overwhelming and important when you’re a teen, and the Julia captures this in her despairing narration as she grows apart from her best friend Cassie, who disappears from her life, first figuratively, then literally.
<em>Dress Codes for Small Towns</em>
“Boys. My boys. I’ve been collecting them like baseball cards since third grade.” In Otters Holt, Kentucky, the small town where 17-year-old Elizabeth “Billie” McCaffrey grows up, the overwhelming narrative is that boy and girl fall in love, get married, and have kids. Billie, though, has always been lacking in gender conformity; labeled a “tomboy” and “one of the boys,” she has a small, loyal cadre of friends in “The Hexagon” — Woods, Davey, Mash, Fifty, and the only other girl, Janie Lee.
