The pleasures of genre fiction lie in its known qualities, but there needs to be substance to the style and challenge in the form. As a plot summary, Sophie Masson’s The Case of the Diamond Shadow (ABC Books, $14.95 pb, 192 pp) works: ambitious and pretty Daisy Miller accepts a job to compile the late Arthur Peabody’s notes on motion pictures into a book. Her employee, Mrs Peabody, is not all that she seems; her old friend George Dale, now working for the world’s most famous private detective, suddenly appears at her hotel; and a thief called the Diamond Shadow is threatening to steal the Blue Moon diamond necklace from one of the guests. In practice, the narrative falls flat. There is much characterisation – clothes, speech, gesture, love interest – but not much character. The dialogue doesn’t fly: too many words, too many explanations. There’s a veneer of 1930s London and Paris, but it is only a veneer.

Chris Wheat’s Screw Loose (Allen & Unwin, $17.95 pb, 336 pp) is a turbo-charged contrast. Eight teenage protagonists, multiple, stampeding plot lines – I think I took a breath around page 200. The novel’s location is ostensibly Vistaview Secondary College, but it is not a school novel per se – rather, an Australian comedy of manners in the way it celebrates character types over rounded individuals. There is Chelsea, a poor little rich girl; Craig, your dependable bloke; Angelo, the sensitive-hearted, Italian AFL draft pick; Georgia, the Indian lesbian; Joshua, the gay guy; Zeynep, the Turkish Muslim; Khiem, the Vietnamese criminal trying to go straight.

At their best, Wheat’s characters are extreme enough to fracture the often po-faced accounts of identity so often suffered in young adult novels. One character – Matilda, the Australian dog girl, raised by the dingoes and star of Japanese Manga series – is off-beat and compelling; and ‘Gay Week’ at Vistaview is a delightfully cringe-worthy sequence. Sometimes, however, the figures are insufficiently grounded in the social to allow them to work satirically. The principal of Mary Magdalene Ladies’ College, for example, falls into easy slapstick, while others are given so much inner dialogue that they start to work like much more conventional characters. The movement between real and hyper-real produces an uneven mix of easy gratification and mettle. It is sometimes interesting, certainly well paced, often funny, but overall not quite satisfying. The book either needs to take just one more step into true D.B.C. Pierre territory, or commit more fully to the category of traditional novelistic character.

The island as a self-contained but in-between space is an established motif in children’s literature; children in a time of war are another. Both are liminal structures. The island is usually situated somewhere between the conventional and anarchic, and children are given licence to roam within clearly established geographic boundaries. The serious business of war takes adults away, letting children play at men’s and women’s business. The cover of Jack’s Island (Fremantle Press, $16.95 pb, 224 pp) by Norman Jorgensen is a lovely piece of design and works to capture and communicate both of these moods. There is a treasure map, two boys on a raft with a skull and cross bones flying high and the Japanese wartime flag washed into yellow.

The story is ostensibly Jack’s (but belongs equally to his friends Banjo and Dafty) who are spending part of World War II on Rottnest Island, off Western Australia’s coast. Their parents and the island community are building an aerodrome, and the boys pass their time constructing hill trolleys and canoes, getting caned, drifting into shark-infested waters, playing too near the test firing of naval guns: all the usual stuff.

It is not a complete Boys’ Own success, however. The opening struggles to give the backstory and there is an overarching tone of elegy, which niggled; a feeling that memory is animating the tale rather than the tale itself. It is difficult to say whether this is a structural fault or a stylistic merit. It works insofar as the episodic series of events mirrors the kind of brutal get-on-with-it quality of the island community. Equally, however, narrative tension is dissipated when the novel keeps moving on to the next event. Nevertheless, I took heart in the real and secure place that family occupies in this novel and enjoyed the sense of the insular warmth produced by such island places: all those personalities burnished by history and close proximity.

From page one, line one, word one, I was absorbed by Steven Herrick’s Rhyming Boy (UQP, $16.95 pb, 180 pp) – a window into a boy’s world. It is a fairly nice world, and Jayden is a fairly nice boy, one whose mother didn’t stay in touch with his father. She also gave him a silly name based on a footballer. So Jayden Hayden doesn’t have a father, and there is a ‘Boys and Books and Breakfast’ barbecue coming up at school at which he is supposed to produce one.

There is not much ‘difficulty’ in Rhyming Boy. Jayden wears the absent Dad narrative lightly, or maybe he is just mature beyond his years. Although there is an innocence to Herrick’s characters that in other novels might cause them trouble, in the novels under review I had ‘buts’ in my head to do with form and narrative, even to do with writing competence. Here, however, is a book in which the writer has both measure of his voice and material. I know this street. I know this neighbourhood. I know the characters. I even liked the ancillary ones. I was caught in the story arc.

Steven Herrick’s verse novels are well known. There is still breath and rhythm in this, his first prose work for children. That orality at the heart of Herrick’s enterprise lets him carry a reader wherever he wants. Good report cards always say where a student needs to go next. Herrick is no student, but he needs to step out of his comfort zone, either generically or structurally. He is an effortless writer, but he needs to apply this magnificent ease to some real difficulty.

Which brings me to Morris Gleitzman’s Then (Viking, $19.95 pb, 192 pp), a simple book that tells an emotionally complex story. Readers au fait with Once will be familiar with Felix and Zelda. They are still in Poland, still looking for a safe haven, although there is now a sense that World War II will not last forever. Then is aimed at a younger audience than Anne Holm’s classic I Am David (1963), but the narrative territory and writing excellence have much in common.

The direct, co-opting, unflinching voice of Felix is the piston driving this book.

You know how when you and two friends jump off a train that’s going to a Nazi death camp and you nearly knock yourself unconscious but you manage not to and your glasses don’t even get broken but your friend Chaya isn’t so lucky and she gets killed so you bury her under some ferns and wild flowers which takes a lot of strength and you haven’t got much energy left for running and climbing?

            That’s how it is now for me and Zelda.

Felix’s voice reaches out: its accepting, slightly numb tone pulls you in. It just keeps going because, as Felix says, ‘I’m Zelda’s evidence’. Story is the moral project here, moral in the educative rather than prescriptive sense of the word. The final sections, which are upsetting, conjure up other more contemporary acts of martyrdom. Then takes the reader to the brink, but Felix backs away from the martyr’s path. As I finished the book, a line from a Brecht poem rang in my head: ‘everyone has good reason for what they do.’

Children should be given access to truth, and there’s an art to truth-telling. It is called Then.