KATE MARTIN
BOOKS TO LIVE BY●Mariella Frostrup
Tales to tear a teenage girl
away from her phone
WRITE TO
MARIELLA
Got a dilemma?
Email mariella@
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on requestM
y daughter used to be such a keen reader.
But since she turned 14 she has lost all interest
in books — it’s all about Netflix, her phone,
WhatsApp, Snapchat ... boys are on the agenda.
Prising her away from her screen is increasingly
difficult, so we’re going hard and implementing
a “no phones after 7pm” rule. Can you recommend
some teen reads I can slip onto her bedside table
that can’t fail to grab her attention?N
ow you’re asking. When I was a teenager the Young
Adult genre didn’t exist, so it was straight from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Mallory
Towers, the Enid Blyton fantasy series set in a girls’
boarding school, to my parents’ bookshelf. The titles I
reached for took me prematurely into an adult world
I couldn’t comprehend (and sometimes still don’t)
but they also offered the opportunity to explore some
of life’s bigger themes with that all-important sense,
in youth, of entering a forbidden world.
Nowadays there are bookshelves signposted forteenage readers, bending under the weight of
instructive morality tales, opening our children’s eyes
to diversity and inclusion, empathy and mental health
issues, displacement and despair, all filtered sensitively
through the eyes of some of our most inspired novelists.
Sometimes, though, escaping real life is as important
as being instructed on how to live it. If that’s what
you’re after, I’d recommend a deep dive into the Narnia
for atheists that is the writing of Philip Pullman. In
adulthood, set to interview Pullman when I returned
from a foreign trip, I made the fatal mistake of taking
only the first two books of the His Dark Materials
trilogy on holiday with me. Never has a vacation felt
so unendurably long as I counted the days waiting to
get back home to The Amber Spyglass! Lyra was the
name I nearly chose for my firstborn, so delighted
was I to have finally found a feisty female heroine who
led the action, valiantly fought the bad guys and saved
the world. The only reason I haven’t included it
below is that you don’t need my help to discover
Pullman’s globally successful franchise ■No Filter
Orlagh Collins
Bloomsbury, £7.99
A heart-warming rite-of-
passage debut from a writer
with seemingly forensic insight
into the mind of a teenage girl.
Emerald is sent to stay with her
Irish grandma after her mother
is found unconscious. In a big
seaside house with no wi-fi
she’s disconnected from
friends and a bout of online
bullying long enough to meet
Liam and begin a summer of
self-discovery and first love.We Were Liars
E Lockhart
Hot Key, £7.99
Cadence is the eldest
daughter of a family so rich
they own a private island. But
money can’t buy happiness or
save you from problems such
as addiction, abandonment
and worse. Over the summer
she falls in love but winds up
being found in just her
underwear by the water’s edge
with no memory of what’s
happened. And that’s not even
the biggest plot twist ...One
Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury, £7.99
Dense prose can be off-putting
to teenagers used to texting.
This Carnegie medal-winning
novel by a one-time Irish
children’s laureate is written in
a poetic format that makes it
instantly immersive. It explores
the difficulty conjoined twins
Grace and Tippi have at their
first school in their teens, and
the challenges of how to
develop your identity when
you are reliant on another.Secrets of the Henna Girl
Sufiya Ahmed
Penguin, £6.99
A fascinating and shocking
exposé of the world of forced
marriage here in the UK. Zeba
Khan is a normal British
schoolgirl, prepping for exams,
dreaming of love. Her world is
turned upside down when her
family take her to Pakistan
for a “holiday”. Zeba is locked
in a battle for her freedom and
independence from family
expectations and cultural
dictats. An inspiring debut.The Sunday Times Magazine • 49