From Great Expectations’s Pip and Estella to My Brilliant Friend’s Elena and Lina, these volatile years have inspired many brilliant novels
No wonder adolescent years are such fertile ground for novelists. It is one of those times when change is accelerated as we are pushed into unavoidable, exciting, frightening adulthood. Sometimes willing, sometimes not, we become aware of the controlled safety of childhood slowly retreating into the shadowy past. I always think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the essence of adolescence, where danger and excitement hang in the air but can evaporate in a puff of wind.
Things can happen in that cliff-edge time. “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.” So says a character in Megan Abbott’s thriller Dare Me. It’s something I wanted to capture in my new novel Crushed. The three girls in the novel are from very different backgrounds but the various alchemies of home life, coupled with their emotional trajectories, collide and explode and what could have become simply a rueful memory of youthful difficulties turns abruptly toxic and marks them forever.
Continue reading...from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HIiZfN
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