Y.A. Crossover

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/ya-crossover.html

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KIDS OF APPETITEBy David Arnold335 pp. Viking, $18.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

Arnold’s funny and touching second novel (after “Mosquitoland”) is about many things: making peace with the past; the families we create; abstract painting; and what it means to be a “genuine heart-thinker.”

Sixteen-year-old Bruno Victor Benucci III’s father died two years ago, and he misses him — a lot. His dad taught Vic about Matisse and helped him feel better about having Moebius syndrome, a rare neurological disease that causes facial paralysis. When Vic’s mom’s dopey boyfriend, Frank, proposes, Vic runs away from home, carrying only his father’s ashes and his grief out into a New Jersey winter night. He meets Madeline, almost 18, who shows him a warm place to sleep, along with Coco, an 11-year-old with the vocabulary of a truck driver, and Zuz, who does not speak. Baz, who becomes the leader of this band of misfits, asks Vic only two questions before offering him a place to stay: “Do you need help?” and “Did you hurt anyone?”

The story effortlessly switches between Vic and Mad, the past and the present. In the present, Vic and Mad are being questioned by the Hackensack Police Department. We won’t know why until the novel’s end. Arnold has a talent for stringing words together in just the right, jumbled order. His sentences are arrows. When Vic tells the sergeant interviewing him, “I’ve always wanted to be strong, Miss Mendes. I just wish there wasn’t so much fire,” it feels as if gravity has doubled down on your chest. But as Vic realizes, it’s much easier to face the flames when you know others are standing with you.

THE GRACESBy Laure Eve352 pp. Amulet, $18.95. (Young adult; ages 13 and up)

“The Graces” demands to be read twice: The first time for the suspense; the second for the subtleties you missed initially. Eve’s rich story is about the kind of magic that comes from spells and the kind that comes from those moments when the present feels right and the future full of possibility. “As we spoke in low voices, life seemed to expand before us,” the narrator, River Page, says about a conversation with her crush, Fenrin Grace. “The endless universe, filled with questions and dark mystery.”

Like everyone in her small English town, the newcomer River is fascinated by the Grace family: 17-year-old Fenrin and his twin, Thalia; dark and funny Summer, 15; the aloof matriarch, Esther; and the brooding father, Gwydion. According to local lore, the Graces are witches. How else could they be so captivating, so unknowable? When River’s plan to befriend the three siblings works, she is as surprised as anyone.

Eve’s short, choppy chapters create a page-turning pace and lend urgency to the story’s mysteries. Why did River and her mother have to leave their old town? Is the “Grace Curse” real? Can Fenrin, Thalia and Summer really never be in love with a “nonwitch”?

Though River’s angst is often one dramatic exhale away from toppling into hyperbole, Eve’s lovely language makes it work. By the end of “The Graces” it’s clear that River’s theories about Summer, Thalia and Fenrin reveal as much about her as they do about them.

REPLICABy Lauren Oliver544 pp. Harper/HarperCollins, $19.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

Half of “Replica” is told from the perspective of a suburban teenager named Gemma. Flip the book over, and you get a version of the same events through the eyes of a teenage girl named Lyra. That format might have been clunky or hokey, but Oliver (“Vanishing Girls”) makes it work.

Lyra’s story starts at the Haven Institute, a research facility off the Florida coast where she and other “replicas,” or clones, have been produced. After a bomb destroys Haven, Lyra, along with 72, a male replica, must escape. On the mainland, Lyra’s regimented existence is suddenly uncertain. What experiments had the doctors been conducting on her? Why did touching 72 make her feel so strange? How did the girl who saved them not know she herself was a replica? That girl is Gemma, whose story is the more suspenseful. Self-conscious and privileged, Gemma has her own questions: Why did her father leave his pharmaceutical company? What did her memories of a statue of a “kneeling god” mean?

“Replica” has awkward passages. (“Lying gave her a sticky feeling in her chest, like she’d accidentally inhaled a condom.”) But others make you stop and ponder. “Wasn’t it better to get it over with at once, to let the pain in, to let it take you?” Gemma wonders. “Wasn’t it better than these years of puncture wounds and paper cuts, these chafing lies and half-truths, that left you rubbed raw and exposed?” The unfinished feel of the endings invites you to keep contemplating: What makes a human human?

EVERY HIDDEN THINGBy Kenneth Oppel361 pp. Simon & Schuster, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

The fantastic “Every Hidden Thing” is a work of historical fiction centered on the Romeo-and-Juliet romance between Rachel Cartland and Samuel Bolt, the teenage children of rival fossil hunters. Oppel, the author of the Silverwing trilogy and other novels, brings you back to 19th-century America, when the West was wild, P.T. Barnum’s circus was the greatest show on earth and dinosaur discoveries were hot.

Rachel wants to become a paleontologist like her father. Samuel loves the thrill of discovery, and while he admires his braggart professor father, he does not want to inherit the man’s volatility and flexible morality. The two main characters’ complexities emerge slowly, like the bones they painstakingly uncover. Naturally, their fathers’ encouragements to “spy” on each other only deepen their relationship as the two families find themselves traveling by train to the Wyoming Territory, where the discovery of a giant tooth hints at the possibility of a new species, one Samuel has already chosen a name for — Tyrannosaurus rex.

Third-person sections about the Sioux boy trying to be a warrior who first found the giant tooth of “the Black Beauty” aren’t frequent enough not to seem random. And it’s jarring when Rachel and Samuel switch briefly from first-person narration to addressing each other. But these are quibbles. Oppel offers an exciting and nuanced portrait of an era when great discoveries were lit by the desert sun, not the glow of a computer screen. A time “where everything was being broken down, and built anew.”