In the best traditions of Harlequin romance, or indeed Jane Austen, Jess and Mitch find that attaining intimacy is a risky business. Rapprochements come and go because of an ill-timed joke, a flippant remark, or a misunderstanding. Jess is smart, confident, and quick-witted, an Elizabeth to Mitch's Mr Darcy. He delivers a put-down just as wounding as Darcy's 'not handsome enough for me' remark when Jess takes her leave with 'I guess I'll see you round then':

[Mitch] looked around in a way that suggested he'd forgotten she existed. His face changed as he processed what she'd said, and he let his gaze tally up each and every facet of her bedraggled appearance, his expression somewhere between amusement and ... yes, it was pity.

When he answered, he showed his teeth, like he'd enjoyed a joke. 'I doubt it.'

In their second year of university, Jess and her friends are no virgins, and the novel is not an exploration of first sexual experience. The question is, then, whether it can legitimately be labelled Young Adult fiction, since that genre is all about first experiences. On some book sites, Summer Skin is classified as New Adult. Certainly, its language, explicit sex scenes, and portrayals of excessive alcohol consumption steer it away from a young teenage readership. Older readers will appreciate the honest portrayal of contemporary relationships, and Eagar's skilful delivery of the smart and often angry banter between Jess and Mitch as they struggle towards an understanding.

In Frankie (Penguin, $17.99 pb, 314 pp, 9780143573166), first-time author Shivaun Plozza has given us another angry, potty-mouthed heroine for the modern age. Frankie Vega's constant exclamation is 'Shit!' a word usually accorded its own paragraph, and there is a lot of it around in her world. Battle-scarred, expelled from school for violence, on probation and living with her single Aunt Vinnie above their Collingwood kebab shop, Frankie has a lingering memory of her mother abandoning her in a shopping mall. So when a strange, street-smart kid called Xavier shows up claiming to be her half-brother, it is like a 'bitch-slap from fate'. Xavier's father is the man Frankie's mother ran away with, so Frankie's sympathies do not extend very far. 'I look him over and it's like a sumo wrestler is bear-hugging my lungs.' She's not at all sure she cares enough to invest in this new relationship, and Vinnie warns against it, but when Xavier disappears she sets out to find him.

This doesn't sound like a light-hearted read, but Plozza finds humour in the unlikeliest of situations, and the first-person narration and quick-fire dialogue are often obscenely funny: I frequently laughed aloud when reading Frankie, despite being slightly appalled at her attitude and behaviour. Teenage girls with a tougher mindset will immediately connect with this smart-talking, gutsy heroine who pushes away everyone who dares to come too close. Characterisation throughout is strong and original, particularly the depiction of Frankie's friendship with Cara and her fraught relationship with Daniel ('an underpaid psychologist-in-the-making, trying to get me to open up about my feelings'), and Plozza has a fresh way with similes ('His eyes are red-rimmed and cloudy, like somebody ran a hot bath in his head and steamed them up'). Only the pacing is a problem: the unravelling of Xavier's disappearance occupies almost the entire novel, with a quick resolution aimed at maximum emotion in the final pages.

Fourteen-year-old Kirra in Megan Jacobson's Yellow (Penguin, $19.99 pb, 259 pp, 9780143573333), another first-person narrator, also has a problem mother, one drowning herself in gin ever since her husband ran away with another woman. Quiet, shy Kirra is bullied at school by the cool girls as she tries to hide her mother's alcoholism – not easy when a drunken Mum crashes the school social. Dad's new partner clearly doesn't want Kirra around, and Dad, a hippy surfer, fails to see his daughter's pain. Amid all this shitty realism – Kirra is yet another heroine who punctuates her paragraphs with this four-letter word – Jacobson unexpectedly introduces a magic realism sub-plot. Through a broken Telstra phone box – the novel is set in 1994 – Kirra receives a call from a boy called Boogie who claims to have been murdered twenty years ago. He tells her who his murderer is and begs her to bring that person to justice. In return, he promises to make her stronger and her life better. Accepting the challenge, Kirra finds her voice and learns to feel good about herself: '"I'm still shy," I admit, pulling the sleeves over my hands, "and I might always be, I don't know, but I think you can be shy and still feel okay about yourself at the same time".'

Go, Kirra! Not a heroine to love unequivocally – she is a bit whiny and self-pitying, at least in the beginning, and she does bang on about her yellow eyes – but Jacobson is a fine writer with an eye for the natural world and a talent for describing it. The descriptions of the sea and surfing are almost Winton-esque, and the little plot twist at the end is beautifully set up.

Scot Gardner is another fine writer whose particular forte is the troubled young man. The Way We Roll (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 197 pp, 9781760290399) is not as memorable or as powerful as The Dead I Know (2011), perhaps because its protagonist doesn't quite engage our sympathies as Aaron did, and a car park hardly rivals a funeral parlour as an intriguing place to work. Will is a runaway from the upper end of town, educated at an élite school, who is sleeping rough and earning a pittance pushing trolleys at a supermarket. Motherless since the age of five, he has been raised by his father, but Dad has committed an appalling act of betrayal which Will can't forgive.

Initially regarded with suspicion by his Sudanese co-workers, he is befriended by Julian, a 'Westie' just out of 'juvie', taken into his own fractured but functioning and loving family and taught some survival skills. When his boss, Joanie, another rough diamond, convinces him that his future probably doesn't lie in a supermarket car park, Will is persuaded to return home and face his betrayers. The lesson learned? 'Some love makes you stronger and wiser and a better person; some love is toxic shit.' That word again.