The Trouble With Marlene / Film Studies

Parents have a lingering impact on their teen children.

If you act like Marlene, you end up like Marlene -- messed up, lonely and broke. No wonder Samantha rejects her mother's lifestyle. In The Trouble with Marlene, mother and daughter share one thing -- thoughts of suicide. Marlene never stops talking about it, but for Samantha, it's a private affair. There's one other private thought for Samantha: putting a pillow over her mother's face and bringing the madness to an end. How far is she prepared to take her fantasy?

In Film Studies, 15-year-old Cass is so cool she's cold. That's what people think. But she struggles to decide what role to play in life -- an act that swallows her whole. It's her director father, long absent, who leaves her struggling for an identity. The one thing she knows for sure is that she's fed up with her mother's ever-changing boyfriends. Then along comes a school film project and things get strange. But so what if the boy she likes films her twirling around half naked? Her father makes porn, doesn't he?

Each book in the Single Voice series consists of two separate but thematically connected stories with distinct inverted covers in an alluring "flip-book" format. Exploding with the urgency, drama and confusion of adolescence, these books will appeal to both avid and less experienced readers. No subject is off limits in the Single Voice series.

Billie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet and sometime essayist. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Caroline Adderson is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories. She was the 2007 recipient of the Marian Engel Award. She lives in Vancouver.

Melanie Little, series editor, is an award-winning author and editor of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Author of the highly acclaimed young-adult novel The Apprentice's Masterpiece, she lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she teaches creative writing.