Behind the elegance, discipline and applause of the ballet world lies a demanding culture of perfection, and Ariane Beeston's Don't Forget to Smile offers an honest and compelling glimpse behind the curtain.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Clara, Elle and Ben, three talented young dancers competing for a coveted place at the International Ballet Grand Prix, the novel explores what it truly costs to pursue excellence. Each protagonist faces their own personal battle: Clara struggles with the expectations of fitting the traditional ballet mould, while Elle and Ben challenge outdated attitudes and entrenched power structures within the dance world. As their individual journeys unfold, an unexpected scandal draws the trio together in surprising ways.
Maisy Hayes feels like the background character of her life. Never the prettiest, the smartest, or the coolest in the room. Never with the newest phone, most expensive shoes, or designer bag. Her special treat only ever came in the form of a dollar slushie from the mall.
Maisy faces a situation no teen, let alone adult, wants to encounter. The Hayes family is deep in financial trouble, struggling to make ends meet.
With Maisy’s absent father lurking in the back of her mind, she is determined to make a future for herself. She’s not sure what yet — though she is positive she wants anything but a life like her mum's.
She dreams of having enough money not to live paycheck to paycheck. To buy things without thinking of the cost.
This novel centres Alfie who believes he has found ‘the one’. Meet Maya, his best friend and girl of his dreams. Alfie and Maya share a long, intimate history together.
They spend both the highs and lows of their life together, their loves and
losses, their pains and gains. They share everything, right? Or that’s what
they both thought until they discover an underlying romance to their
relationship that blurs the line between friends and lovers.
Alfie’s
desperate search for love finds him falling for Gwen, one of the close members
in their friendship circle and becomes confused when she doesn’t share the same
feelings for him. It turns out Gwen was hiding a bigger secret of her own…
These are the elements of the holy trinity that a great story begins with and, I’m delighted to say, qualities Carla Salmon has nailed in her debut YA novel, We Saw What You Started.
Nightmares
don’t need passports … lines
like this set up a delicious air of intrigue and uncomfortable concern. What is
it exactly that US teen, Otto is fleeing from? How does it influence his
assimilation into his new Aussie coastal home in Red Sands and how will his
past implicate his future?
Salmon
deftly sows seeds of secrecy, while plunging the reader headfirst into a dire
and dangerous situation; an unchecked bushfire. Now, any Aussie worth their
salt knows this is not the sort of calamity to mess around with and yet as we
dive deeper into this story, the threat of fire occurs, again and again.
Perhaps
that is what I like best in Steph Bowe’s posthumously published, Sunny At
The End Of The World. Even this ingenious title suggests something beyond
utter hopelessness. Can an ending really be the start of something new? This
premise forms just one part of Bowe’s YA fiction which prima facie, seems a
straightforward dystopic foray into Zombieland.
We’ve
seen that all before, right? An almost comic romp into the horror of the after dead.
And yet, within Bowe’s capable and quirky hands, Sunny’s worlds, past and future,
assume a reality that teens immediately warm to.
It’s 2018 just days after a global outbreak leaves the world afflicted and stricken. Zombies plague the major living centres, destroying civilisation as we know it, undermining any survivors’ sense of security and sanity.
The narrator is seventeen-year-old Astrid, who has finished years of homeschooling with her father who lost his job and filled his life with controlling others’ lives.
Astrid is now starting High school.
Her father is not happy about Astrid’s forthcoming schooling,
nor the clothes her mother wears to work. He believes that social media is
breaking everyone’s brain and making them hate.
This is just one of his rants concerning capitalism and its influence on society, that he wars against with a distorted mindset; a thought process that forced his son to leave home.
But he is determined to hold tight to the control over the remaining members of his family.
The story begins with Darcy travelling home to LA from a music festival, when the bus breaks down. Both she and Russell find themselves stranded at a fairly remote bus station, where she asks to borrow his phone charger. And so the adventure begins.
For a narrative set over the course of just 24 hours, a lot goes on. Without giving the storyline away, suffice to say that there are global rock stars, Mexican feasts, swimming pool break-ins and security interrogations … all while our two main characters get to know each other in a funny, intense and very visceral way.
Allayne Webster's latest novel, Selfie, is highly appropriate and current. At a time when Social Media Influencers control and break apart many people’s lives, comes the brilliant, riveting Selfie.
Allayne speaks with Anastasia Gonis about her novel.
You have two leading characters, Tully and Dene, total opposites. Their friendship, initiated too fast by Dene, is cryptic, therefore suspect. An Insta famous influencer and a lonely girl. Is this unusual friendship the central theme of the story?
One hundred and ten percent. This story is about relationship power dynamics—who holds power and who relinquishes it, and the interchangeable nature of that. It’s about the desperate need for connection and friendship in the face of living up to other’s expectations and keeping everyone happy (and failing dismally in the process.) Selfie is about how individuals may employ manipulative tactics to achieve desired relationship outcomes, but how they often fall victim to their own guilt/moral compass and regret certain decisions. Ultimately this novel is about settling into the idea of letting go, of ceasing to attempt to control everything and everyone, and to simply trust in another person. It is also about dodging grief—as we soon learn both girls are grieving the loss of loved ones who are not yet in fact dead.
Can Selfie be described as an exploration or an uncovering of the roles played by Social Media Influencers, to manipulate and gain power and control over their followers?
Definitely. There’s a blatant portrayal of this in Selfie when it comes to Dene’s engagement and likes on posts. Influencers do their best to harness social media algorithms and make them work in their favour, and so invariably, their decisions are strategic and not necessarily from the heart.
Too soon, Tully is emotionally controlled by Dene, and the relationship totally consumes her. How difficult was it to write the powerful scenes surrounding Tully’s conflict?
I think Tully presents herself as relatively confident, but internally she struggles with self-belief and confidence like anyone else. The opening scenes of Selfie highlight the things she values; signposts or markers, if you will, are provided to the reader with what Tully thinks makes a person valuable. As the novel progresses, these values come into question. In a way, Tully is the victim of capitalism and the messages she’s internalized about money, status and value.
When writing any emotionally powerful scenes, I need to tap into my own fears and misgivings and harness them for the story. Writing is like acting on paper. I think I very much feel/react emotionally when writing and this helps to make my characters believable. You must be honest with yourself. You can’t ‘put on a show or a brave face’ when writing. You effectively have to let it all hang out—as soul-cringingly embarrassing as that can be. No shame here!
You have perfectly captured the gap between adolescents and adults, and the attitude and behaviors of teenagers. Please comment.
I often give myself pause for thought about what makes me an adult. I mean, quite often I just feel like a big kid. At what point did I grow up? Perhaps we’re the same person, just a little wiser with every passing year? When writing for young adults, I speak to them, not down to them.
Some adults infantilize young people, which helps no one, and certainly doesn’t foster strong open communication. Stop. Listen. Learn. Don’t discount young people’s experiences as being somehow world’s away from your own. They’re not. We exist in the same space. Our feelings and our reactions are valid, no matter what our age. If anything, young people are learning to access their internal toolbox for dealing with complex social situations; they’re learning self-reflection, endurance, self-confidence, empathy… Allow them the space to do that and to f*ck it up.
Your leading character Dene is complex, Insta famous; a pyramid character created by her exploitative mother. How difficult/easy was it bringing her to life?
I will confess Dene took a little more work than Tully. Dene is more often than not the antagonist in the story, and I think I struggle to inhabit that as a writer. When I removed blame from Dene, she became easier to write. In order to write about her successfully and three-dimensionally, I had to consider her actions with a level of empathy; I had to think about the drivers making her behave in the manner she does. Are they really her fault? That said, Tully is by no means a saintly character either. They’re both flawed, which is what makes them interesting, and is what makes the reader invested and (hopefully!) question whose side they’re on.
There are several sub stories that enrich the storyline, such as Tully’s family upheaval, the ending of Kira and Tully’s friendship, and crushing outcome of Dene and Tully’s relationship. How important are these stories to the novel?
The sub stories of any novel should always enrich the overall narrative. All killers, no fillers—as they say. In the case of Dene and Tully, what goes on for them in private at home, or when separated from each other, has a compounding impact on the overall story. How they perform in other relationships says something about their character and their nature. Humans are multi-faceted. We all know that in the company of some people we present a different face or a different version of ourselves. The same thing goes on in the story. That said, I think the most powerful and telling part of any story is what is revealed via the character’s internal monologue versus their action/what they actually do and say. That’s why I love writing in first person—because our actions don’t always marry our words, nor our thoughts. I love the interplay between these.
Full of tension and at times painful to read, how important was writing about this theme for you?
In all honesty? It was cathartic. Authors have a responsibility to assist publishers to promote their work, and this means regularly and actively being online. Adults are just as suspectable to subliminal messaging, just as vulnerable to images of perfection, etc. For me to write Selfie, I had to be in touch with those positive and negative emotions produced by social media. If I, as a rapidly ageing adult, sometimes struggle with the messaging of the online world, what on earth is going on for our young people? I am always thinking: Thank God I didn’t have social media as a teenager, I would’ve embarrassed myself no end. I would have over-shared, overthought, potentially shared dangerous images of myself for attention and validation, and I would have written/said things that two seconds later I would have evolved from, yet would be recorded for years to come and for history to judge. The idea frightens the hell out of me. In a way, writing this novel was protecting younger me from the things I could have done had I grown up in the era of the online world.
What do you hope readers will come away with from Selfie?
As a writer, I hope to hold up a mirror and reflect society back at the reader. I would hope Selfie provides Aha! moments, or vigorous head-nodding, or exasperated sighs of OMG, that’s me! I’ve felt like that! Or I’ve been guilty of that. I don’t ever hope to deliver moral judgements or to lay foundations for what might make things better.
What I hope to do is A) create empathy, B) incite questions; make readers interrogate their own viewpoint and consider other angles. Ultimately, at the core, I want young readers to know their self-worth is not defined by the adulation or condemnation they receive from friends or strangers online.
Selfie is about empowering young readers to see through the glossy veneer of the online world. In moments of vulnerability, I would hope they remember Selfie and question any unhealthy thoughts induced by online interactions. I would hope it’s a tool in their toolbox for thinking beyond surface level.
The excitement of anything’s possible crashing into the I don’t know if I’m good enough or worthy enough questioning.
It’s a lot! And it’s meant to be. Because the only way to get from childhood to adulthood is through. Living it all. Experiencing it all. Feeling it all.
That’s why teen fiction is fertile ground for exploring big issues and an avenue for navigating common challenges.
It’s easy to see why these books are delighting readers
young and old – the writing is fresh, funny and fabulous.
Lottie Brooks is one of those tween characters who is
sometimes all-bluff, sometimes all-heart, and you sort of fall in love with her
either way.
She is a frustratingly endearing creature who creates
crazy and embarrassing moments in every aspect of her life – the word ‘chaotic’
in the title is an understatement.
Lottie’s voice is clear and engaging, even when her
actions are heart-stoppingly ridiculous. She constantly gets herself into
awkward situations, giving readers the joy of watching her squirm out of them.
Core character, Whitney Curry has thoroughly prepared herself for a semester abroad, arming herself with the perfect, yet extensive to-do list in order to experience the Paris magic at its best.
Wanting to live the life of her idol, Josephine
Baker, Whitney aims to set foot in all the places she did. Although she feels
prepared for this trip, unexpected locations (and people) may leave her ideal
trip up to chance.
Determined
to keep her love and school life separate, the line between the two gets
blurred and both her head and heart are overwhelmed.
It’s told
from the perspective of two teenagers, Kat and Liam, who were step-siblings for
just 48 hours when they were five and their respective parents briefly married
in Vegas.
This story
contains all the important elements of a teen thriller: action, thrills, lust,
spills, twists, power, fortune, fame. And of course, a little bit of gender-fluid
snogging on the side.
With a complex storyline that will reward readers’ attention to detail (I suggest an intensive rather than extended reading period for this work), the book is pacy and well-written.
Facing the world through the lens of autism, 15-year-old Emma navigates her way through the struggles of grieving by regular runs with her dad around East Point Reserve, the only thing gifting her reprieve.
When
her life does not go as planned, the grief of her mother’s death eventually
overcomes her in a tidal wave that is hard to endure.
Emma’s best friend Summer has always strived to be the best at sport, aiming to be honoured with a place in the Sports Institute Program.
The trial day finally comes, everything Summer has been dreaming of
for years, only to find out her best friend Emma has been privileged with the
special place on the team, not her! This is not how things were supposed to
turn out, yet the repercussions of this decision can make, or break even the
strongest of friendships.
It’s the beginning of a new year and everything in Lottie Brooks’ life seems to be going unusually well: Daniel as her boyfriend, the ‘Fun Police’ (Lottie’s Parents) becoming less anti-fun, and The Queens of Eight Green are better than ever.
And it’s truly
awesome!
One Song tells the story of 17-year-old Eva, an introverted songwriter who is obsessed with Cooper, the son of a genuine rockstar.
The two
of them used to have something going on before the pandemic, but now it seems
they’re just buddies. Although he HAS just invited Eva into his band, with the
hope of winning Triple J’s Unearthed Songwriting competition.
For Eva, there’s a lot on the line.
Calliope-Jean
Maree McGee is about to start high school. It’s not the selective high school
that her mother wanted her to attend, and that’s just fine by this tween who is
keen to lose her reputation as the brainy, quiet one, and equally keen to lose
her cumbersome name.
So, this ritual annual family friends’ holiday is going to be her opportunity to become just plain Callie, and be ready to start Birchwood High, with the other kids in the traditional summer group. She’s not helped by her hovering and restrictive mother, but she is determined, and finds an unlikely ally in the newest addition to the pack of kids, Owen.
