In Marr’s Preloved, an entertaining tale of contemporary schoolyard relationships and friendships, Amy Lee is a bright and breezy sixteen-year-old, with a glamorous best friend, Rebecca. Amy’s Chinese mother offers copious advice about how to avoid disaster; this her daughter tolerates as superstition. But when Amy fails to return a locket to Rebecca, its rightful owner, she realises that she should heed her mother’s knowledge of ghosts, for Logan, a charming boy from the 1980s, arrives to haunt her.

Marr has plenty of fun evoking the 1980s: technology (carousel projectors, Ataris), fashion, films and music, and especially the slang, much of which has a ring of ‘ironic cool’ to the twenty-first-century teenagers. Amy is an appealingly eccentric and witty guide for a fun history lesson in thirty-year-old popular culture. But solving the puzzle behind Logan’s appearance involves tragedy when puzzling and intriguing connections with past events are revealed. Amy must face personal realities to lay her ghost. Her superstitious mother is the only one who believes in what Amy is experiencing (the school counsellor has a different view). She has the power to help the troubled Amy through her belief in the supernatural and the power of time-honoured Chinese rituals and practices. Even at the story’s emotional climax Amy has a smart quip. Here, though, humour serves to underline the story’s emotional heart, not to trivialise it. Amy and the reader come up trumps.

Eagar takes her seventeen-year-old protagonist into much darker territory in Night Beach, as the title suggests. Painter and surfer Abbie is in an emotionally difficult state: ‘At seventeen, I’m in-between. Staring at the carnival from a distance. Not sure if I want to go forward and become an adult; liking the view too much to turn back.’ Abbie’s much-loved older sister has moved away to university; Abbie is living with her distant mother and step-father, and doesn’t hear from her father as often as she would like. She is nearly at the end of school and must develop her Art Project for her HSC. Then there is Kane, her step-cousin, recently returned from a surfing trip and living in the basement. Abbie becomes obsessed with Kane, as with her art. Her school friend Hollywood warns her about Kane, but Abbie finds the emotional and physical pull too strong to resist.

Kane seems changed by his trip, and Abbie sees a ‘shadow’ behind him, an unsettling presence which leads to violence among the hierarchical surfing fraternity at her local beach. She experiences altered reality, apparitions, and journeys to the ‘night beach’, where she encounters the sinister creature with flesh and blood in its claws. These events form the subject of her painting. What is real and what is imagined in the journey Abbie takes to produce her creation? Is the story a prolonged metaphor for the creative process?

Eagar is in fine control of her Gothic material. The tone is brooding rather than frightening, moody rather than suspenseful, and gives the reader space to interpret the way the world tilts for Abbie. We observe, rather than stay at the heart of things, perhaps due to the present-tense telling.

Even if the final revelations and dénouement are more prosaic than the reader might have expected, the characters, the powerful ocean setting, the descriptions of surfing, the exposure of a particular masculinity, the exploration of the creative impulse, and Abbie’s journey from uncertainty to acceptance, produce some fine writing indeed.

In The Messenger Bird, Tamar’s family is still mourning her adored eighteen-year-old brother, Trystan, who died a year ago. Their mother, after treatment for depression, returns to the family home but remains distant. Her father, to distract himself, renovates their historic home; Tamar has violent nightmares about Trystan’s fiery death in a single car accident. None of them speaks about Trystan or the guilt they all harbour. The narrative is told in alternating chapters, split between Tamar, Gavin, a new neighbour and a musician like Tamar, and Nathaniel in the 1880s. He is conjured when Tamar plays a musical piece she finds during the renovations, along with a photograph of him. As the story progresses, we understand that the two are connected across the centuries by grief and guilt. In the present, Gavin recognises Tamar’s grief-stricken state, while hoping for more than friendship, but she is too preoccupied to notice him. The unravelling of events in the recent and far past, and their surprising connections to the present, enable Tamar to reconcile herself to her brother’s death.

While Gavin’s voice takes time to find a convincing register, the chapters set in the nineteenth century bring to life an older Australia through plangent descriptions and character portraits of the Cornish miners and farmers of the area around Kapunda. Additionally, science is invoked to validate Nathaniel’s time travel through reference to Einstein’s idea of a ‘special relativity’. However, it is the evocation of place and the character of the wonderful old house itself that convince the reader that lives and experiences can transcend the barriers of time. Despite its call on Einstein’s intriguing theory, there are few surprises in this narrative, which treads conventional paths and takes us where we expect to go.

Clearly, it is not easy being a fictional girl in contemporary Australia, but, according to these writers, the trials and metaphysics associated with emerging adulthood build resilience, surely not a bad thing.