As is probably very apparent, I don’t read much contemporary YA. I prefer my stories with magic or mystery (or both). Then I saw three contemporary books by Laura Wiess – small, lightweight paperbacks with oh so smooth covers and a single image on the front. They just felt so good in my hands, I decided (after a perusal of the summaries) to give them a shot.

I started with Such a Pretty Girl (a fast and disturbing read about a teenager who’s been sexually assaulted by her father) and moved immediately on to Leftovers. The title refers to the two protagonists, Blair and Ardith, best friends in 9th grade who are the “leftovers” of their families. Blair is the daughter of a high-powered defense attorney with aspirations to a judgeship. Ardith’s parents have turned their home into the local party house, hosting bashes for underage teens every weekend where drugs, alcohol, and sex all flow free. Both girls are alternately ignored or used by their parents as well as adults and their peers at school.

The book’s synopsis will tell you that Blair and Ardith have done something terrible, and they have – but what they’ve done is not revealed until the very end of the book. The bulk of Leftovers consists of the girls telling an initially unknown person in alternating chapters of the events that led up to the terrible act. Some of the events may seem unrelated at first, but they all coalesce at the end and the effect is a powerful one.

Whenever an author decides to tell a story using more than one voice, she’s taking a risk. Will the two voices be distinct enough? Will both be equally interesting and engaging? Wiess succeeds in this regard – Blair and Ardith are sufficiently different that I could recognize who was relating which part of the story without being told. Wiess uses the same font for both girls; different fonts are not necessary to tell them apart.

But alternating points of view is the not the riskiest technique Wiess uses: the majority of the story is told in second person. As Blair and Ardith relate their sections of the tale, they refer to themselves as “you” instead of “I.” Therefore, it is not Blair or Ardith who is experiencing these events and having these thoughts, it is you, the reader. You’re the one who feels the pain and fear and hope and desperation and love of our narrators. The second person technique places the reader squarely in the footsteps of the girls and works wonderfully as a device for stirring empathy.

Wiess has a great knack for really getting the reader into these girls’ heads. Blair and Ardith are both in awful situations (including violence, sexual assault, and neglect), situations which I have never been in, but I still found it easy to relate to both of them. I credit the choice of second person for a lot of this and Wiess’ writing for the rest. The girls’ love for each other and pain over what has happened in their lives are so believable, I became deeply invested in their story. This is vital when we know ahead of time that the girls have done something awful – we need that sympathy and we need to feel it strongly.

Leftovers has its weaknesses. This is only the second book by Wiess I’ve read, but she reuses a lot of the same minor plot devices from Such a Pretty Girl: the girls are vegetarians and make a point of letting the reader know it; there’s a sympathetic police officer; both girls are in a parochial school where 9th grade is still in middle school; and so on. I’m concerned that over time, the voices of the teenage girls Wiess uses may blend together because of these factors.

Still, Leftovers is a marked improvement over Such a Pretty Girl, which I also enjoyed. The characters are more fully-formed (even if the adults remain a bit one-dimensional), the themes are deeper, and the plot is tighter.  If all contemporary YA books were written with this level of skill and intensity, I might read a lot more of them.