DIRTY WORK (13+) by Julia Bell

Macmillan, £9.99

LIFE AS WE KNEW IT (12+) by Susan Pfeffer

Marion Lloyd, £6.99

GIRLS NOW SEEM SO much in the ascendant, triumphing over boys in exams and trumpeting girl power, that it’s easy to forget how vulnerable, unhappy and uncertain their common lot still is. I am sick of the flood of pink books I get sent, tittering over dates and discos like an eternal sleepover party. Even when genuinely funny – those by Louise Rennison or Sue Limb, for example – they don’t probe any deeper into what Louisa May Alcott dubbed “girlitude”.

Julia Bell’s second novel for teenagers, Dirty Work, is a harsh and gripping contrast to the above, in tackling the glo-bal problem of sex trafficking. Oksana is a teenage Russian girl being trafficked into London by Zergei. Hope is a spoilt, middle-class 15-year-old who watches The OC, chatters to her girlfriends and is bored with her parents’ new house on the French Riviera. The two have nothing in common until one of Zergei’s victims kills herself. He’s short of a girl and, fuelled by desperation and cocaine, plans to “borrow” one. The girl is Hope.

Bell’s debut, Massive, was a powerful exploration of body dysmorphia and Dirty Work, published on the bicentenary of Parliament’s vote to abolish the slave trade, is as timely as it is punchy. (Unicef gets 50p from each sale, by the way.) My daughter found Hope unbelievably naïve, but her self-centred voice is an authentic mix of the shrewd and the silly, contrasting with Oksana’s damaged resilience. Hope’s descent into the nightmare world of child prostitution begins with an act of defiant generosity, smuggling Oksana into Britain along with her father’s duty-free booze. But the traffickers are not about to give up so easily, and Oksana’s desperation to find her brother in London traps them both.

Teen fiction is always tricky to pull of – especially on a subject such as this. Bell, a talented novelist with an interest in edgy subjects, winces away from having Hope raped, although we are in no doubt that this was and is the fate of Oksana. Both girls want to grow up too soon, and both are brutally enlightened as to how dangerous this can be. Bell gives both her heroines a happy ending, with each girl reunited with her family. A writer such as Meg Rosoff would have had no qualms about pushing the story into tragedy, and made it stronger as a result.

Rosoff’s How I Live Now is also echoed in Susan Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It. This imagines the consequences of the Moon being knocked out of orbit, looming much larger in the sky and causing unforeseen chaos as tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes destroy electricity, crops and daylight.

Ever since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic Little House on the Prairie, about how a family survives the long winter, there has been an enjoyably apocalyptic strain to some children’s literature. The young are haunted by the possibility that mankind will share the same fate as dinosaurs; the perennial attraction of picture books about Noah’s Ark is not just those cute pairs of animals but a deep need for reassurance that life will continue.

Pfeffer’s novel also ends on an upbeat note, although it has its inevitable cull of sympathetic minor characters. It’s a bit too saccharine, but also readable, intelligent and absorbing. Miranda, the 15-year-old narrator, begins as an average self-absorbed American teenager, and may not, like her namesake, get a brave new world, but her likeable family pulls through, thanks to foresight, affection, luck and boyish muscle.

Girls may well inherit the earth, but they still need some help from the opposite sex, it turns out.

What’ s more...

CLEVER POLLY & THE STUPID WOLF (6+) by Catherine Storr

Gentle classic of brains over brawn.

THE BRAVE SISTER (5+) by Fiona Waters and Danuta Mayer

Classic picture-book retelling of Scheherazade’s Arabian tales.

CLEVER KATYA (5+) by Mary Hoffman and Marie Cameron

A Russian peasant girl solves the Tsar’s riddle.

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