How many books have I read? Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred ...? I could compile a list. But what would it tell me? What I know? What I have forgotten? What I was? What I wanted to be? What my mother and father wanted and expected and expect me to be? Millions of Cats, Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale, Where the wild things are, The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Stuart Little, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers, The Little Prince, Member of the Wedding, Gigi, Lord of the Flies, Return of the Native ...

This is Willa, the 15-year-old narrator of Early Disorder, looking at her bookshelf and wondering if you are what you read. Notice that there are children’s books and adult books, and nothing in between. Nothing, in fact, like Early Disorder or the three other books reviewed here, nothing about 15-year-olds written for 15-year-olds. The heroines of these novels would doubtless wince at being called ‘new adults’, yet two of the books bear a seal reading ‘a book for new adults’ and all of them carry, for better and for worse, didactic overtones. Death, sex, disease, unhappy families and divorce are no longer forbidden territory in writing for children: the admirable intention is that the world of fiction should exclude no aspect of the real world which must be mentioned if the truth is to be told. When case-history is substituted for plot, and ‘things were looking a bit more hopeful’ for ‘happily ever after’, when you are asked to care about the actors rather than have them live through adventures for you, subtleties of characterisation become more important than plots.

Early Disorder is about anorexia nervosa, Catherine loves about a girl driven to attempted suicide by the stresses of her parents’ collapsing marriage. In A Star for the Latecomer the heroine’s mother dies of cancer. Only one of these three – Early Disorder – manages to tell the story from the inside: the other two have more of the agony column about them. Jacob have I loved is different, in that it is set in the past – the 1940s – and has an exotic background: a fishing community on a small island in the Chesapeake Bay. This would make a comparison with, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels of frontier America more appropriate than one with books about urban mental and social disorders were it not for the fact that it deals with the pain that can exist within a loving family as frankly, and in the same spirit, as the others.

Of these novels, Early Disorder alone capitalises on teenage speech. The first-person narrative switches from slangy, flip asides on parents (drama-critic father, translator mother), clothes, smart kids, schools, things and food, to descriptions of a Hieronymus Bosch world of dreams and nightmares. If Willa’s well-to-do, cultivated, kindly family (‘Everyone who knows our family thinks we’re the most content and normal in the world. Something special. A family that can’t be touched’) were not so well drawn, the slide from confusion and depression into self-starvation would be inexplicable. As it is, the stratagems Willa uses to avoid eating, and to avoid confronting the fact that she is starving herself to death, come to seem psychologically credible: you begin to see why not eating might seem the only thing left for you to do.