Teenage heroines are ten a penny, but every now and again one will saunter up, offer you a fag, and hit you with her story right between the eyes. Careless, a debut novel by Kirsty Capes, is the story of Bess, a 15-year-old who has just found out that she is pregnant by Boy, a 19-year-old rebel without a cause/shelf-stacker at Tesco, whom she meets when he crashes a stolen car into a church. Getting pregnant at 15 is complicated enough, but Bess has been in the care of a foster family since the age of four and her relationship with foster mum Lisa is fraught. Should she keep the baby, or have an abortion and pursue her dreams?
Care narratives are rare in fiction – Tracy Beaker inevitably comes to mind, and certainly Capes shares with Jacqueline Wilson a tenderness for her vulnerable characters and an understanding of the deep, knotty friendships between girls. There are shades of Georgia Nicolson, the hilarious heroine of Louise Rennison’s YA books, as well as Caitlin Moran’s Johanna Morrigan. But although Careless is a coming of age story written in a very accessible style, it is suffused with an adult understanding of relationship dynamics and, perhaps most viscerally, the struggles young women can face to take ownership of their own bodies (a botched home abortion scene is one of the book’s most shocking moments). It is also a hymn to salvation offered by female friendship – Bess’s best friend Eshal has problems of her own in the form of a prospective arranged marriage.
Capes is a care leaver herself and has a PhD in care narratives in contemporary fiction, which was supervised by Bernardine Evaristo. The Booker-prize winner’s mentorship has no doubt been beneficial – Capes has credited her help with descriptive imagery. I get the sense, though, that the underpinning emotion of the story is all Capes’s. Bess’s voice fizzes from the pages: “My two life choices are either to do really, really well at school so I can get out of Shepperton as quickly as possible ... or become one of the locals in the Crossroads who drink so much that all their teeth have fallen out. I could go either way right now.” She can floor you with unexpected revelations about the limits that are placed on foster families: “In this family we don’t talk about love,” she writes. “We just don’t. It’s a care thing; against the rules, for starters, the ones that say foster carers can’t hug you or take you for a haircut without permission.”
I’m unashamed to say that this novel made me weep and, despite not containing an ounce of didacticism, it offers profound insight into the impact of conditional love on a “looked-after” child. “There’s something wrong with being in care, the care system, and it’s to do with making us into a transaction,” Bess says. Capes is a rare new talent, and she has written something very special here: a novel that transforms, with the lightest of touches.
• Careless is published by Orion (£12.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
