As a kid, I read the way most young bookworms do: indiscriminately and with total absorption. Amid the blur of quickly consumed paperbacks, a few stand out. One, Babyface, by Norma Fox Mazer, a 1990s young adult (YA) literature powerhouse, was about a fourteen-year-old girl named Toni who believes her life to be close to perfect. Then comes the inevitable upheaval: her best friend moves away, and her father suffers a heart attack. The hardest blow comes when she visits her much older sister, Martine, in New York City. Martine is a stranger to Toni who rarely communicates with the family. Toni’s visit is lonely and frightening, with days spent alone in her unfriendly sister’s bleak apartment. At last, Toni confronts her sister about her aloofness and learns from Martine that her parents used to fight viciously. At Toni’s birth, they resolved not to subject their baby daughter to the turmoil that marked Martine’s childhood. Martine’s estrangement is about more than just elder-sibling resentment: she reveals that during one of their battles, she witnessed their father strike their mother. “He slugged her,” she says.

How is Toni to assimilate this awful information into her understanding of her family? Is she, like Martine, going to despise them both, though her mother and father swear they’ve moved past the incident and are reconciled, or can she accept that her imperfect parents are capable of acts of hatred and violence as well as love and tenderness?

To my mind, Babyface is emblematic of YA literature at its best: books that, in addition to their real-feeling characters and engrossing storylines, help guide young people into the moral murk of looming adulthood. “I hesitate to say I’m delivering messages,” Mazer said of her books. “I’m writing stories and novels. I hope there’s an underlying feeling for the reader — a hope, perhaps a moral. But I’m not preaching. I’m telling stories.” Teens, famously, do tend to be sensitive to condescension.