All This Could End opens with a terrific hook: ‘Nina Pretty holds the gun to the boy’s head, her other arm around his neck. Her balaclava itches.’ Her mother, Sophia, who also wields a gun, announces the hold-up at a small-town bank ‘like she’s the ringmaster at a circus’. Nina’s father, a sometime history teacher, heads to the vault with the bank manager. Over by the security cameras with a can of spray-paint is Nina’s twelve-year-old brother. The narrative then shifts back to April, nine months earlier. While staying for a few months at yet another town in between robberies, Nina begins school, where she meets Spencer Jack.

Steph Bowe's All This Could End

The book alternates, in third person, between Nina and Spencer. Spencer, as we are often told, is a smart, awkward, kindly introvert. Nina – as we are also frequently told – is guarded, bookish, and guilty about her family. Nina’s resentment of her parents, Sophia especially, is palpable. Nina, a sympathetic protagonist, counts the days until she turns eighteen and can escape from this milieu.

Queensland-based writer Steph Bowe is not much older than Nina. Remarkably, Bowe wrote her first novel, Girl Saves Boy (2010), when she was fourteen. Bowe crafts some passages that reinforce this book as a teen drama with a comic edge. The witty banter and idiosyncrasies of her seventeen-year-olds are entertaining. But the book is very heavy on character exposition. The novel’s climax, which opens so briskly and engagingly, is weakened by lengthy speeches about how characters feel towards one another and what they may or may not do next.

Mothers get a bad rap here. Early one morning, Spencer’s mother leaves for Fiji with her muscle-bound toy boy: ‘I’m going on a holiday and I don’t know how long, okay?’ Sophia Pretty is the sort of smiling, hard-boiled crime family matriarch more often encountered in films; I was reminded of Jacki Weaver’s deadly Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody in Animal Kingdom (2010). Sophia challenges Nina with ‘games’ like grifting, pickpocketing, and hot-wiring cars, to prove her tactical knowledge and family loyalty. Bowe certainly places her characters in exciting situations and gives them much to say along the way. For the most part, All This Could End is an enjoyable book.

Antonella Preto's The Mimosa Tree

In December 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, eliminating certain groups of missiles and nuclear weapons. This historic occasion was a great relief to millions of people, among them the protagonist of The Mimosa Tree. For eleven months, Mira’s anxieties about imminent nuclear war have jeopardised her progress as a first-year university student. However, Mira discovers the battle is closer to home, as her beloved mother reveals that her breast cancer has returned.

The Mimosa Tree explores ideas about danger, autonomy, and transformation. The novel begins in media res with Mira, having felt ‘like a witch trapped in a fairy castle’ during twelve years of ‘boring’ Catholic school, giving herself a haircut, and then emerging from her bedroom in black jeans and a grey T-shirt, much to the chagrin of her aunt and mother. Introverted Mira has enrolled in a degree in art education. Although ambivalent and indecisive about her future, she acknowledges the pressure she feels as ‘the first person in this blood line to make it to high school let alone university’. These expectations invite comparisons with Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992). Mira’s campus life improves when she meets Harm, who shares her apathy, bleak outlook, family difficulties, and fear of the atom bomb.

Preto highlights how former high-school nobodies are given the opportunity to reinvent themselves. The first year of university is an interesting subject matter for a Young Adult novel. But The Mimosa Tree is uneven. A young woman like Mira, barely out of school, is expected to behave like an adult. Readers may feel the same way; Mira is difficult to like. She is lazy, truculent, and ungrateful, and Mira’s family and friends are quick to point out her faults. The narrative suffers from some heavy-handed characterisation, and Mira’s angst is tiresome, although her distress is not unfounded. Mira worries about her ailing mother and detests her brutish father. War allusions are used effectively throughout and the end of the Cold War provides a powerful climax to the end of Mira’s year.

Aimee Said's Freia Lockhart’s Summer of Awful

Freia Lockhart’s Summer of Awful follows on from Aimee Said’s first Young Adult novel Finding Freia Lockhart (2010). It is the holidays before Year Eleven. Freia alludes to troubles in Year Ten that she wants to put behind her, including ‘breaking up’ with her old unpleasant group of friends and banding together with three new girls who share her love of books and music. The novel begins with a list à la Bridget Jones that outlines Freia’s past year in numbers (school musicals 1; brownies baked 200-ish; boyfriends 1). Her boyfriend is a keeper, too, it seems. Daniel wears tight black jeans, loves The Ramones and carves ‘DTF + FL’ into the tree at their park. Freia imagines her summer will be perfect.

Like The Mimosa Tree, this novel moves quickly into darker territory, although Said’s tone remains comparatively light. Freia’s calm, pragmatic mother, Gene, announces that she is heading to hospital for surgery, including a possible mastectomy. Daniel, who admits that he is leaving town for a while, seems to be avoiding Freia’s phone calls. A summer that promised to be brilliant is now just ‘awful’.

Freia is a likeable character. Entrepreneurial, she bakes brownies and sells them to her local café. She is honest about how guilty she feels when her thoughts turn to her wayward, floppy-haired boyfriend, and not to her ill mother in hospital. When Freia’s little brother Ziggy creates trouble, their grandmother comes to stay in order to help the family. Busybody Gran is something of a cupid, too.

Said’s first-person narrative explores typical teenage concerns: girls trying to fit in with the peer groups they have carefully cultivated, navigating the rules of well-meaning parents, and wanting to know what love feels like. The novel is light and age-appropriate: Freia and Daniel kiss a lot, but stay within the boundaries their liberal parents have imposed. Author Said is in good control of this innocent, quirky world she has created.

The maternal characters in these three Young Adult novels want adventure, success, and love for their daughters. Great tension arises between younger characters yearning for autonomy and the mothers who would keep them close.