MURKMERE
By Patricia Elliott
Hodder Children’s Books, £5.99; 333pp
ISBN 0 34087790 1
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In my day, I tell my 11-year-old daughter crossly, we graduated from Joan Aiken to Jane Austen, without expecting to have fiction for and about aspiring adolescents. The unstoppable tide of novels about makeovers, discos and boyfriends is greeted with enthusiasm by her, and deep resentment by me.

For the past two years, chick-lit has been moving steadily downwards to satisfy the “tweenager”: a child who isn’t yet a teenager, but longs to be. Louise Rennison’s series about Georgia Nicolson, whose further “fabitty fab confessions” are published in And That’s When it Fell off in My Hand, has me shrieking with irritation. My daughter, however, thinks she is hilarious, and queen of the pink-book pack. On the other hand, she thought Terence Blacker’s Boy 2 Girl, about a boy who pretends to be a girl at his new school, “absolutely pants”, whereas I roared with laughter and wanted to give copies to every mixed-up kid of 11-plus.

Sue Limb’s debut in this market is a cause for celebration, not least because we both loved it. Girl, 15, Charming But Insane takes the usual despondent 15-year-old narrator — no boyfriend, much prettier best friend (“they’re always called Flora,” my daughter observes), and makes her genuinely funny, romantic and touching. With “70 spots to support, greasy dark hair, bum looks big in everything, crazy moments (and an) imagination ”, Jess is madly in love with the gorgeous Ben Jones.

He, of course, isn’t interested. Jess has you rooting for her from page one. Stuffing her bra with minestrone and being videoed adjusting her falsies in the loo at a party are just one of her many humiliations, but by that time she discovers her heart really belongs to her friend Fred.

“I’d rather be stuck in the Gobi desert and groomed to death by meercats than marry you,” she says, sensibly. If Clueless were transported to Neasden, it would be like this.

Patricia Elliott’s Murkmere springs from the kind of tradition the teenaged heroine of Northanger Abbey would have recognised at once — gorgeous, skin-crawling Gothic drama. Orphaned Aggie is sent as a servant to Murkmere, a sinister house with a crippled Master and a corrupt steward. Asked to spy on the Master’s ward, Leah, who seems to have an uncanny affinity with swans, brave, clever Aggie gets drawn into a plot by the Ministration, which worships birds as divine and tells of a Fall by those who tried to become human.

What is the secret of Leah’s birth, and why does she obsessively mend the swan-skin they find stuffed in a tree-root? Fraught with fenland mist and magic, this supernatural thriller, set in a parallel world, is compassionate and original.

If adolescent girls would stick to worrying about things that go bump in the night instead of thongs that grow lumps in the light, our lives as parents would be so much easier.

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