Clean by Juno Dawson

Let’s talk about genre for a bit.

 

On one hand, it’s very useful, particularly for those folk that like a very specific type of book and want to find more of the same. On the other hand, it can stop us from discovering something new, something amazing.

 

Readers can miss some brilliant books because they are pitched as crime or horror and ‘those books aren’t for me’.

 

No other genre suffers from this more than that of ‘Young Adult’. While the sort of books that get grouped in YA are not particularly new – the genre itself has only been a popular thing for the last ten years or so, since the arrival of Katniss Everdeen and Bella and Edward.

 

They are books about people in their later teenage years, discovering love, drugs, sex, essentially life for the first time. They are not necessarily written by young adults, but they are marketed at them.

 

The genre itself is split up into all sorts of other mini-genres – YA Dystopian, YA Romance, etc – so even though you might like YA, it doesn’t really say much about your reading type.

 

There isn’t an ‘Old Adult’ genre – books about old age pensioners that are put into a category specifically for them that says ‘Hey everyone else, don’t read these!’

 

Why am I getting on my soap-box about this?

 

Because I’ve just finished reading Clean by Juno Dawson. It’s a Young Adult novel about socialite Lexi Volkov who ends up in rehab following a near overdose.

 

Lexi has to deal with her feelings about her current enabling boyfriend, secrets from the past and new friendships with the other residents of the Clarity Centre, all of whom have their own different demons.

 

What makes this a Young Adult novel? Lexi is barely out of school, drinking illegally. The other characters are all a similar age – young people troubled with addiction.

 

It’s BETTER than a lot of other ‘Middle-Aged Adult’ fiction that deals with rehab, and frankly, though we’re told the ages of the character, they could be ANY age.

 

Dawson deals with the complexities of rehab with skill, making it seem very real and believable. In other hands Lexi Volkov (Heir to a Russian oligarch) could have been unlikable, but she’s humanised and brought into the real world, made relatable by her very ordinary and common problems.

 

This is a book aimed at Young Adults, and they will love it – but if you’re not young, if you’re an old-adult, then don’t think this is not for you. It’s for everyone.

 

Clean by Juno Dawson is available now from Quercus

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And I Darken by Kiersten White

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we’d started a new YA book club at work, and while we haven’t quite gotten around to the club part, I have now read the book.

 

And I Darken by Kiersten White boldly bills the lead character as the latest in a long line of heroines that includes Ellen Ripley, Elizabeth Bennett, Hermione Granger and Buffy Summers.

 

Books that make these sort of claims tend to fall into two categories, the vast majority of them are perfectly good books that are the victims of over eager publicists, or they genuinely are that good a book.

 

The latter are, unfortunately, rare. The reason good characters stand out so much, male or female, is because of their relatively small number among a vast sea of their merely adequate counterparts.

 

Telling your readers that this is the next iconic name in books is a bit like purposefully trying to write a tweet that goes viral. It should just happen naturally.

 

Having said all that, does Lada Dracul warrant being added to the list of slayers, spies and Scarlett O’Hara?

 

It’s a tentative ‘yes’ from me – and here’s why:

 

And I Darken is not just the tale of Lada – it’s also the tale of her brother, Radu (here’s mistake number one in the marketing – it’s not just for girls, Radu is as strong and compelling character as his sister).

 

They are the younger children of the leader of Wallachia, and he is absent from much of their early lives. However as they grow, he begins to sense something about them both. When it comes to leaving the country, he takes them with him, but ultimately has to leave them behind with the Sultan in order to safeguard his homeland.

 

Radu, younger, sensitive, but with a gift for charming people (you can see where this is going) starts to adapt, while Lada contrarian ugly duckling that she is resists, however they both befriend Mehmed, a boy they later discover is the son of the sultan.

 

And so we have our threesome. Every good story needs a trio of central characters be they Harry, Ron and Hermione; Kirk, Spock and McCoy; or Wakko, Yakko and Dot (the Animaniacs for those uneducated of you who need telling) – and And I Darken is no exception

 

Some of the peripheral characters are vague and forgettable, a trait that is unfortunate when a few of them pop up unexpectedly later on, causing me absolutely no degree of the intended surprise as I have no clue who they actually are – but our core characters are well defined, and not just our central threesome.

 

Plot wise the story is a little Game of Thrones-esque, a little hard to follow at times, but you get the gist, and understand all the important bits. There’s also some gratuitous nudity, although no dragons (SPOILER ALERT: Or are there? – that’ll make sense when you get to the end, it’s amused me).

 

I was surprised to discover that the book is largely based on true facts – Radu the handsome exists, albeit largely as a footnote in the story of Vlad the Impaler. Here our writer has taken some poetic licence, namely, taking Vlad and turning him into a teenage girl named Lada.

 

I know when I’m reading a good book, not only do I race through it, but I break my rules of how long I’m going to read for – and on this one, not only did I do that, but I also found myself desperately reading every part of the proof copy jacket to find out if any more were planned (yes they are, this is the first in a trilogy).

 

Does it live up to it’s promise? As I said at the beginning, it’s a tentative yes – I don’t believe anyone would have listed Buffy Summers or Katniss Everdeen great female characters of our time after their first outing, but the promise was there.

 

The promise is definitely there with Lada, but this is more than her. Radu plays a huge part in this book, sharing the narrative as equally with his sister. I await the subsequent books eagerly and hope that Radu continues to share this story with Lada. Together, the two of them could usher in the next big series in teen fiction.

 

And I Darken scores 4.1 out of 5 from me. It is published on 7^th July by Corgi Books