SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at four recent releases that explore the lives of teenagers. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Come And Get It author Kiley Reid inspired by the young and their trends
Hanging out with her “very dorky theatre crew” in New York in the 2000s, American novelist Kiley Reid remembers taking bowling alley shoes and wearing them as a status symbol.
Today, the 36-year-old confesses she is out of touch with what is in vogue. When she first saw students around her all in oversized T-shirts, small shorts and Birkenstocks, she thought they might be participating in an event.
“I’m also always shocked at how many of my students wear the exact same black baby cropped top and bulky jeans,” Reid, an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, says over Zoom.
“While I don’t always understand it, I don’t think I’m meant to. As long as they are as kind as they have been to me, they can keep wearing whatever they want.”
Book review: In Kelly Link’s The Book Of Love, teenagers try to return from the dead
Laura, Daniel and Mo from Lovesend, Massachusetts, are dead. But the three teenagers have a chance to rejoin the world of the living as Mr Anabin – their abstruse high school music teacher – and a dog-like companion Bogomil offer them a mission to change their fate.
Along with a stranger, Bowie, the trio are given an enigmatic proposition that goes unexplained for much of this lengthy, diffuse novel: “2 Return, 2 Remain.”
Instead of a mission to escape death, this young adult fantasy bildungsroman focuses on resurrection and choosing life despite the chaotic score of adolescent struggles and desires that haunt the young heroes.
Book review: Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables a pandemic conversation between elderly woman and Gen Z boy
Told from the point of view of an elderly woman sequestered in a posh Manhattan apartment during the pandemic, American writer Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables is essentially an extended monologue.
Its form sits in the grey area between fiction and non-fiction – the essay novel, where narrative is just a thin scaffolding to support meandering thoughts running easily in and out of bounds.
Nunez’s stand-in – an unnamed “I” – ponders a world crumbling under the double horrors of Covid-19 and the Donald Trump presidency, which take a toll on her body and leave her unable to concentrate.
But on her walks around the green spaces in New York, she also assesses the merits of beginning a novel with descriptions of the weather, and men’s continued usefulness in a feminist world – “as a child I always knew that there was a difference between the ways your mother could protect you and the ways your father could protect you”.
Book review: Marie Tierney explores darkness and human monstrosity in debut novel Deadly Animals
Brave and precocious, 13-year-old Ava Bonney defies the typical teenage mould with her macabre hobby – studying the decomposition of animals.
Armed with a red notebook and blue pen, she stealthily ventures out at night, awaiting the next roadside discovery near the highway where she lives.
However, her unusual hobby takes a dark turn when she stumbles upon the body of a classmate.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Feb 24
House Of Flame And Shadow by Sarah J. Maas is the No. 1 fiction bestseller for a second week.
