Sarah Walker’s Water Colours, tells of Bea’s coming of age. She has two best friends – Merryl and Marty, who are as different as chalk and cheese. Merryl is cool, Marty is a nerd. What’s the bond between this unlikely trio? Strangely enough it’s Bea – the one with no parents and few worldly possessions. The only other thing that Marty and Merryl have in common is that they’re both super-rich and Bea certainly isn’t. She lives with her grandmother in a one-bedroom flat where she sleeps on a fold-out bed – much to Merryl’s horror! Marty lives with his handsome father and his beautiful artist mother Suzee in a lavishly appointed modern home; Merryl’s family lives in a mansion. The rich kids have parents who drive them crazy or ignore them; the poor kid, Bea, has no parents, but has an extended group of people who really care for her. So in many ways she’s richer than either Marty or Merryl.

Bea knows very little about her dead mother Gabby and nothing about her father. Grandma knows, but isn’t telling; neither are Bea’s loving Aunty Olivia and Uncle Tim; nor is her mum’s best friend, the ‘pretend Aunty’ Eddy, who lives with her lover, Aunty Gail. As Bea uncovers the mystery, she painfully discovers that though adults still control her life, she can’t rely on adult intervention to solve her problems. The tone of this is immediately convincing and the characters are all such a quirky lot that you believe in them instantly! Our first meeting with Marty, for example, has him spying on people disposing of rubbish at the recycling centre, and yelling at them if they put things in the wrong receptacles. (You’ve got to love him!) The novel’s title refers to the game Marty taught Bea long ago – when they sit on the beach looking at ‘their’ harbour they try to think of new ways to describe the water’s colour, such as Christmas tree green or Aunt Eddy blue. This ‘naming’ of the ‘fluid’, chameleon-like colour of water conveys the idea that everything changes, and that there are different ways of looking at things. Walker penetratingly portrays the capacity children have to change into angst-ridden adolescents who not only hurt the ones they love but themselves as well. Such transformations stem from an inner fear that maybe being an adult is not going to be the liberating experience they’d always thought it would be. Bea discovers adult frailties and confronts revelations about her wild, dead mother Gabby, which both make her cruel and give her new insights into all her loved ones.

This is a moving evocation of teenage experience written in a prose which is always measured and absolutely right. In exploring the lives of three characters on the ‘brink’ of adulthood it quietly portrays the multiplicity of lifestyles and approaches which characterise ‘normal’ life, and richly conveys the power of familial love, guilt and responsibility.

In contrast, Bad Girl is a novel which, hasn’t quite decided what it is. Unlike Clark’s Care Factor Zero which is a searingly realistic YA fiction, this has a racy plot akin to that found in TV serials like Party of Five, which also grapples with the issue of self-esteem with an obvious intention to instruct.

But it’s in maintaining a balance between ‘serious’ novel and action adventure that Bad Girl seems to lose its ‘grip on the tightrope’ at certain points.

Ruth is overwhelmed by overly religious parents and two perfect siblings. She’s the classic middle child, who feels unbeautiful, talentless, and unattractive in personality. When she’s involved in a catastrophic train crash (expertly described by Clark), she narrowly escapes with her life. As she lies dazed by the wreckage, she meets ‘Simon’ who’s about to ‘disappear’ – the crash has given him the perfect opportunity to forget his old life and start again. The plot here becomes an odd combination of the ‘crisis precipitating a life choice’ YA fiction; and an action-packed road movie in which Ruth (who renames herself Sinamon), indulges in all the things parents don’t want to happen to their kids! As a work of escapism it should work brilliantly; it’s even complete with the obligatory makeover-ugly duckling becomes beautiful swan in one quick trip to the beauty salon. But whereas in a movie you might reconcile the action with the denouement, (by a manipulation of soundtrack, for example), in a book, where Sinamon’s resolutions to ‘believe in herself’ are spelled out in words, the previous events are too flippantly described to really support her declaration meaningfully. Despite the cover blurb’s promise that this will offer a solution to a teenager’s search for identity, its strengths really lie in the light-hearted aspects of its plot. So where both novels are written by two very adept writers, it was Bea’s story which really rang true, at least for me.