Coming-of-age books for older readers

Looking back we can all spot choices that changed our lives. Books for older readers often deal with the coming-of-age moments that dot the universal journey from childhood to maturity.
Marthe Jocelyn has written with great panache about wry, even laugh-out-loud moments in the lives of her teenaged protagonists.  In her newest novel, Looking back we can all spot choices that changed our lives. Books for older readers often deal with the coming-of-age moments that dot the universal journey from childhood to maturity.
Marthe Jocelyn has written with great panache about wry, even laugh-out-loud moments in the lives of her teenaged protagonists.  In her newest novel, Would You (Tundra, $19.99) she shows how sensitively she can treat a traumatic moment. Natalie, a carefree 16-year-old living in a small town, arrives home from an evening with her friends to discover that her beloved older sister Claire has been hit by a car and is in hospital barely clinging to life.  We live through the next six days minute by minute as the family teeters between hope and despair. All summer Nat and her friends have been playing a game where they challenge each other with two gross choices such as, would you rather eat a rat with the fur still on or eat sewage straight from the pipe. They all scream with laughter as they try to out-gross each other, but now Nat has to face the worst choice of her life: would she rather Claire die or live on in a vegetative state?
Nat has another problem, too. She knows, as her parents do not, that Claire had decided to break up with her boyfriend, Joe, that evening.  By the time Nat steels herself to confront Joe to demand an explanation of Claire’s last minutes, she has learned much about her own relationship with her sister, how friends treat each other during a tragedy and how adults deal with grief. This is not a gloomy book. Nat has a wry world vision and a smart mouth. Sometimes she’s horrified at what she’s just said, but as she swings between normal and never-normal-again her actions show how perceptive Marthe Jocelyn is about the dilemma of teens caught in an unthinkable tragedy.
    John Ibbitson’s The Landing (Kids Can Press, $17.95) deservedly won the Governor General’s award for his evocative story of life in Muskoka during the Great Depression.  When 15-year-old Ben’s father is killed in a logging accident, Ben and his mother have no choice but to live with Ben’s uncle on his dirt-poor Muskoka farm.  There, all three earn a precarious living running a small marina and store at the Landing. Good with his hands, Ben is useful to his uncle who is also the local handyman, but his real love is the violin. Taught by the local fiddler, he spends Saturday evenings playing for local dances. Desperate for a better teacher, he is trying to deny that, like his uncle, he is now trapped in a dead-end life. Then Ben and his uncle are hired to repair a local cottage for its new owner, a wealthy woman from New York. She brings with her the essence of a life beyond all Ben’s imaginings: elegant furnishings, a piano she plays every morning, recordings by violinist Jasha Heifitz.  When she asks him to play for her sophisticated New York guests, their praise sets him to daydreaming, then hoping she means to help further his aspirations. But at the end of the summer she announces she’s leaving, may sell the cottage, may not return and Ben is plunged into despair.  Is he doomed to be nothing more than the local handyman for rich cottagers? Ibbitson’s elegant prose makes this story sing just as the violin recordings sing for Ben.
In Jolted (HarperCollins, $14.99) Arthur Slade’s protagonist Newton Starker certainly has a life or death problem to deal with but his story has a more light-hearted tone than the previous two books. The Starker family seems to be cursed. Sooner or later each family member dies of a lightning strike. When even his mother, who has tried valiantly to avoid the curse, is hit by lightning, Newton enrolls in the Jeremy Potts Academy of Survival. Surely learning to deal with extreme situations outdoors is the answer! Between competing with Violet Quon for the prize for ultimate survivor, trying to pry a secret from his crabby great-grandmother (the only family survivor besides himself) and dealing with a pet pig, Newton leads us all on a merry chase. 
In Susan Juby’s Getting the Girl (HarperCollins, $14.99) Sherman is far from a typical teen: he’s in love with cooking, detective stories and older women. As he starts Grade nine he has two goals, to “make it” with Dini Trioli, his Grade 11 dreamgirl, and to uncover the identity of the “defiler,” the person who decides which girls will be shunned by everyone. His detective aspirations are revved up when it seems as though Dini might be the next “defiled.”  As he bumbles around trying to solve the mystery, Sherman learns more than he bargained for about girls and the way high school life works.
Whether the tone is serious or humorous, these novels take teen readers into the heart of relationships that become turning points for the protagonists. she shows how sensitively she can treat a traumatic moment.