Because of its obvious sincerity and the humour that enlivens almost every page, it is harder to dislike John Larkin's The Pause (Random House, $19.95 pb, 329 pp, 9780857981707), though it is entirely about youth suicide and contains preachy little lectures on life and death. Larkin weaves a Sliding Doors-style plot around a story of star-crossed young lovers, Declan O'Malley and Lisa Leong, who are kept apart by the sort of bigoted mother who gives gorgons a bad name. Consumed by depression and, we gradually learn, battling childhood demons, Declan misses a vital communication from Lisa and considers ending it all. He is about to throw himself under a train when he takes a split second to pause, and two outcomes flash before his eyes. In one version, he jumps, and the results are as gruesome as you might imagine – Larkin spares no detail. In the other, Declan stays on the platform and is bundled off to a psychiatric ward by paramedics. In a brilliant structural device, the narrative moves backwards from that action in small increments of time (Five Hours Before) and large ones (Seven Months Before), and then gradually advances until nine years have passed – which may be too long, given that both Lisa and Declan, still separated by geography, have found other partners. The sentimental ending is pure Hollywood.

In Nova Weetman's novel Frankie and Joely (University of Queensland Press, $19.99 pb, 264 pp, 9780702253638) two best friends are escaping the city and their mothers to spend a post-Christmas break with Joely's rural cousins. Frankie's mother seems hardly aware of her daughter's existence. Frankie won't miss her mother's current boyfriend either. Joely's mother, who is divorced, is highly controlling, a workaholic, and a fusspot. Sitting somewhere in the middle of these two extremes of motherhood, there is Aunt Jill who seems a permanent fixture in the farm kitchen as she bakes scones and biscuits, and fries eggs and bacon and makes endless bowls of potato salad. Frankie 'wonders if Joely knows how lucky she is to have an aunt like Jill, and how much Frankie wishes she was hers'.

Frankie is the beautiful one of the pair, olive-skinned and naturally elegant, even in her op shop clothes; Joely is a freckly redhead with heightened sensitivity and little sense of style. While Joely's cousins Thommo and Mack lust after Frankie, the two girls are each attracted, unknowingly, to the same bad boy, Rory, who cunningly plays one off against the other. Frankie can take care of herself, but the reader's heart bleeds for poor Joely.

'I don't think I've read another Young Adult novel in which female friendship is dissected with such skill'

I don't think I've read another Young Adult novel in which female friendship is dissected with such skill and with such attention to detail. Small actions are subjected to exhaustive interpretation; passing remarks are analysed to within a millimetre of potential meaning; emotions soar and dive and heartache is always just a heartbeat away. It is exhausting being a teenager, but there is exhilaration in the mix too, and Weetman's strength as an author is to convey this rollercoaster of emotion and make the reader care for her characters.

The mother in Kathryn Lomer's Talk under Water (University of Queensland Press, $19.95 pb, 336 pp, 9780702253690) is a journalist who abandoned her husband and son some eighteen months previously for a new life with a new man in Adelaide. She regularly emails her son, but Will doesn't read them: 'I don't want to know what she has to say or what I'd say back to her. Some not very nice things, that's for sure. To just up and leave like that. Who can you trust if you can't trust your own mother? She didn't just leave Dad, she left me, too. Did she think about that at all?'

How he learns to let go of his anger is largely a result of his friendship with Summer, a girl he meets online and who turns out to be deaf. Unfazed, Will throws himself into learning Auslan, and he is an apt pupil: 'A lot of the signs just make sense to me. It's not that they're simply gestures, but they have an inherent rightness about them. They're transparent,' he explains, sounding not like a fifteen-year-old boy but like an adult author showing off his research. In no time at all he is 'chatting' with Summer and the two are falling in love. There is a meddling friend, and a tricky yacht trip around Bruny Island, but no real conflict. At more than three hundred pages, the novel badly needs it. Without conflict, this is just a sweet story about a developing friendship with a sign language fingerspelling alphabet tacked on. The structure of the story is repetitious, with its alternate chapter narrations. Summer is in the habit of writing letters to her dead father; she tells him all about Will and their adventures. Will talks to his father about Summer and those same adventures; Summer talks to her girlfriend, Will talks to his friend ... This may be why the book seems fifty pages longer than it needs to be.

Finally, at Summer's urging, Will opens an email from his mother. She doesn't explain why she left; she just 'needed to leave'; Will might possibly understand when he's older. She loves him and if he can forgive her, she might come for a visit. Will cries. I think any child would, getting an email like that from a runaway parent. You'd think a journalist could do better.