“My first poop was sponsored. My first hate comment came before my first tooth.” We first meet Effie Bright on her way to a support group for “kidfluencers”, whom she thinks of as “fellow tortured comrades”. Each of them has grown up online, with significant chunks of their lives monetised.Effie loves her family but frequently wishes she could start over without all this digital baggage. Her chance comes when public disgrace – her father’s shenanigans with a wellness influencer – means the family, minus Dad, relocate to a small town where the neighbours avoid social media. It’s tricky to write about the dangers of the internet for young people without seeming didactic or hypocritical; the influence of tech corporations on all our daily lives means that opting out and functioning in society as it presently exists are mutually exclusive choices. Or as one of Ellie’s new friends puts it, “It’s practically impossible not to use the internet for the most basic tasks.” Karen Harte, who has previously illustrated Leona Forde’s Milly McCarthy books for younger readers, brings both humour and nuance to her first solo graphic novel, Effie Is Offline (Gill, €12.99). The idea of performing online while having a secret identity is neatly tied into a school project on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (the teachers in YA fiction deserve medals for their capacity to always find a suitable literary text to correspond with a protagonist’s dilemma). This provides many of the story’s most hilarious moments, including a musical interpretation (“I’ve been Bunburying for manys a year”) and a reimagining of the characters as influencers (Algernon Moncrieff as a “TikTok foodie who reviews cucumber sandwiches and steals brand deals” is spot on). The mix of image and text is perfect for the subject matter, letting us see the shift from a screen-focused world into Effie’s more analogue one, and allowing for quick, effective introductions to each of the characters (the two-page spread in which we get a recap of Nana’s life is particularly strong). For all that content creation can seem frivolous and narcissistic, we are also reminded that it can be, for some, a path to financial security within a precarious economy (Effie’s mother is of the generation to have believed college was the answer, only to graduate into a recession). The satisfying mix of the trivial and serious in this book is, one imagines, something Wilde would approve of. Another classic school trope, the close-to-the-bone classroom debate, is at play when Ryan Shipley’s first day of high school in Starling, Tennessee, involves her peers arguing over the upcoming execution of serial killer Gabriel Thorn. He is, they say, a monster – the man murdered seven women, including his wife and the mother of his child. What almost no one in Starling knows is that Ryan is that child, born Gabrielle Thorn: “Not even 18 years old, and I’ve already lived so many lives. Been so many girls.” The prolific author Elle Kennedy is best known for her adult romance (including the recently-adapted Off-Campus series), but she has also written several suspense novels, and both elements are at play in her YA debut, Thornbird (Electric Monkey, £9.99), published under the name E Kennedy. This mystery tale is both twisty and swoony; alongside a quest to find dead bodies, there are hot boys (one has “a diamond-cut jawline”, the other turns up on a motorbike and runs his hand through his “messy, just-rolled-out-of-bed” hair). A satisfying summer page-turner. Another love triangle turns up in Belfast writer Jenny Ireland’s latest novel, French Kisses (Penguin, £9.99). The absolute last place 18-year-old Margot wants to be is on a family holiday to France, but she’s rebelled one too many times and staying home alone is no longer an option. [ Northern reading lights: There’s a real children’s books community out there to discoverOpens in new window ]Ireland captures Margot’s coming-of-age ache perfectly: “It wasn’t always like this. this weird disconnect with my family. Everything used to make more sense.” Existing fans will be unsurprised to see her once more skilfully explore the impact of disability on a family. The romance element – one nice boy, one dark brooder, and a secret they share – is a little less successful in its execution, but the handling of the ex-swimmer protagonist’s rediscovery of herself, via a newly-kindled passion for surfing, is beautifully done.“We wait for the stars. It only takes a dot / the size of a grain of sand to lift us; something small that / promises something so much bigger, / like the galaxy swirling in our favourite stone.” Bridget Hamilton’s verse novel, We Wait for the Stars (Little Tiger, £9.99), is a moving exploration of grief and love. Celeste’s friends haven’t known what to do with her since her father’s sudden death (“a freak event / as rare as / seeing the solar eclipse from your garden”), noting she’s “got even weirder” and is “always in her head”. New friendships with classmates who share her love of photography and nature seem to offer flickers of hope in the darkness, but things inevitably get a little bit more complicated than anticipated. Hopeful but never saccharine or simplistic. Could an expedition in the wilderness sort out today’s mentally-ill youth? The parents of the teenagers sent to Adventure Therapy seem to be counting on it. “What the hell happened to us? How did we go from making fire with our bare hands to having panic attacks in a closet a couple of million years later?” Case, the narrator of Peter Bognanni’s How to Lose Yourself Completely (Rock the Boat, £9.99), wonders aloud. Abandoned in the forest by their shifty guide, Case and three strangers – and his dead brother’s ex-girlfriend, Diana, with whom there is a knotty history – must team up to survive. There is a danger of this premise seeming gimmicky, but the real messiness of mental health issues is addressed, with Case reminding his newfound friends that “trees and fishing can’t cure anxiety disorder” along with pointing out the many real horrors of contemporary life. “I don’t understand how all these so-called normal people can go through all of this every day, feeling okay.” Touches of humour – regular and gallows – both lighten the mood at tense moments and add authenticity to the slightly-implausible scenario. A gorgeous read (for indoors).Finally, modern medicine’s ideas about pain – and who is expected to endure it, versus who deserves for it to be taken seriously – are put under the microscope in AM Ellis’s I Feel Your Pain (Penguin, £9.99). In this thought-provoking dystopia, a “Freedom System” allows for the wealthier in society to transfer the pain from Helical Disease, a chronic condition brought about by a solar flare more than a century previous, to those who, allegedly, can more easily withstand it. Pain Givers are never supposed to meet their Pain Carriers. But Castor, heir to the pharmaceutical empire that has made the system possible, and Nova, a girl trying to take care of her family, do cross paths – and their love for one another leads to uncovering the sinister truth about this troubled, exploitative society. Ellis avoids being too pointed about its resonances with our own, instead letting us get sucked up in a compelling story about what it really means to endure.