There are YA authors who hesitate to offend readers by showing them the ugly side of high school life, who shy away from the wrenching, painful issues facing today’s teenagers. Mindy McGinnis is, without doubt, NOT one of these writers. Ms. McGinnis confronts these issues and seizes them in a way that is compelling and sometimes disturbing. Her recent novel, The Initial Insult (Katherine Tegen Books), is a case in point.

The Initial Insult revolves around the fractured friendship between Felicity Turnado and Tress Montor, and the mysterious disappearance of Tress’s parents when the girls were in fifth grade. When the story opens, Tress and Felicity are seniors at Amontillado High School, but Ms. McGinnis delves into their past and explores how their friendship fell prey to peer pressure, misunderstanding, and the arrogance of a community where “time carries more weight than money.”

Using short chapters that shift between Felicity’s POV and Tress’s, the author sheds light on the burdens each girl carries. For Tress, it’s the loss of her parents and her dreary life with Cecil, her emotionally distant grandfather who runs a small off-the-road zoo. For Felicity, it’s the stigma of being “new blood” in the town and the fear she will be less attractive because of the seizures she occasionally suffers. Believing Felicity knows why her parents disappeared, Tress concocts a bizarre plan for extracting that information from her during a wild party to be held at an old, soon-to-be -demolished house.

Ms. McGinnis introduces a host of supporting characters that add tension and flavor to the plot, sometimes by deliberately or inadvertently further poisoning the relationship between Felicity and Tress. There’s snobbish party girl Gretchen Astor, football star Hugh Broward, and Tress’s cousin Ribbit Usher, who often becomes the life of a party for the wrong reasons. Adults, such as the aforementioned Cecil, also play a pivotal role in the plot either directly or indirectly. At the same time, they seem dangerously oblivious to what their children are doing. And what are their children doing? This is where McGinnis shows us the darker, uglier side of teenage life. Because, among other things, their children — some barely in their teens — are buying and selling drugs, vandalizing private property, getting drunk, and engaging in sex up to and including intercourse.

I found McGinnis’s writing to be crisp, terse, and poignant. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe will enjoy the connections she makes to his short stories. At the same time, her characters are distinctively hers. They are engaging and plausible, because they speak, feel, and act like teenagers. McGinnis is especially adroit at using imagery to intensify the emotions running through Tress, Felicity, and their classmates. A good example of this imagery occurs on p.23, where Tress explains the turmoil of her emotions while watching the fish in a pond:

The fish flash away as I move, my shadow crossing the water, their world changing again, light to dark, in a moment. Like mine. At least theirs changes back quick, the sun returning to warm them.

McGinnis’s narrative isn’t entirely grim. Humor pops up now and then, even though readers might want to laugh and gasp at the same time.

The one thing that struck me as implausible is the fact that none of the characters have any sibling, at least none that are mentioned. Perhaps there is an explanation for the absence of sibling that will emerge in the sequel to The Initial Insult. Titled The Last Laugh, this book promises to clear up the unresolved issues that remained at the end of the first book and, no doubt, give us more troubling insights to teenage life.