Marlie and Keely used to be friends, in the first part of Grade 8. But then Keely started hanging out with Loren (popular but mean) and dropped Marlie. Then Keely confided in Marlie that she liked Matt, who had been going out with Leah (popular and nice) since forever. Flattered by Keely’s renewed friendship, Marlie got into the conspiracy and took it upon herself to tell Matt that Keely liked him. Leah found out and was devastated. Everyone rallied around Leah in her pain and then Keely denied her interest in Matt. This left the blame to fall on Marlie, who became totally ostracized.

This scenario is only one small part of the back story of Edge by Diane Tullson. It is the stuff of teenage girls’ lives. This minefield of shifting allegiances, treachery, the cruel misuse of power, and the fight to achieve and maintain status is so painful that most adults choose to forget it. Or, they add a few “likes” and a bit of uptalk and dismiss it as silly and frivolous. But it is not frivolous. Current news stories force us to acknowledge that this world can and does breed not just the normal sorrows of adolescence but physical violence, even suicide and murder. It takes a fair bit of writerly courage to tackle this material seriously.

Marlie, the hero of Edge, is surviving Grade 9 through invisibility. She keeps her head down, she doesn’t react, she spends her lunch hours helping out in the library. But then she is “found.” A non-aligned group of kids adopts her. Spearheaded by friendly Ravin and charismatic Mike, this group professes to protect nonconformist students who are being bullied, to offer them freedom and safety. Sounds like a school counsellor’s dream, modelling calm resistance and peer support in the face of intimidation.

But it is not that simple. Marlie has her doubts about Mike from the outset. Her feelings of unease build as Mike breaks into the school computer, as a smoke bomb goes off, as she discovers that Ravin’s mother owns a gun and that Mike knows its whereabouts. The Christmas dance approaches and Marlie gets wind that Mike is planning a disruption. When she objects, Marlie finds herself in danger from Mike, who tells her: “Inside this group you are safe. Outside you are alone.”

The major strength of this novel lies in Tullson’s ability to convey Marlie’s narrowing choices, her entrapment by fear, and her confused feelings of loyalty. All this tension comes to a head at the dance. What was meant to be an elaborate prank involving paint sprayers goes badly out of control. The real gun appears and murder and suicide are barely averted. At the end of the novel we are presented with a situation of disintegration, from which we hope Marlie will be able to build some new structures for her life.

The Christmas dance is really the only black and white element in the book. Tullson does an admirable job of undercutting the simplistic good guy/bad guy taxonomy of young adult life to show its complexity. In the high school world of snap judgments she provides an alternative view without being preachy.

The novel, however, doesn’t work as a whole. A major subplot involves the kidnapping of Marlie’s brother, Elliott, by their estranged father. Elliott disappears at the beginning of the novel and reappears at the end. His reappearance is masterminded by Marlie with the help of a family friend, Chuck, a kindly undertaker. All the scenes involving Chuck are charming and quirky. He uses his professional cosmetic training to give Marlie a makeover, which is gigglesome without ever tipping over into ghoulish. Chuck is also a welcome reprieve from Marlie’s vexed school life, but the kidnapping strand of the story loses tension, its resolution seems contrived, and it never really coalesces with the main plot.

This noisy double plotting also tends to drown out the quiet, crisper elements in the writing. Tullson has a way of tossing off delicious little original observations: “Loren throws a sneer over her shoulder like salt.” What evil is Loren averting, we wonder. When the action slows down for a minute, we can enjoy Marlie’s particular take on the world. “Mr. Inkster’s riveting lecture today is on the life cycle of the fruit fly. Not much of a life, really. You hatch, you lay eggs, you die. I imagine fruit flies wearing sneakers and carrying backpacks in the nano-moment of their teens.”

Edge also shows Tullson’s growth as a writer since her first novel, Saving Jasey. She remains in the world of troubled teens and near-catatonic adults but whereas Jasey is decorated with details that don’t pull their weight, the details in Edge have resonance. For example, both books contain a workshop pegboard with the shapes of tools drawn in outline. In Jasey this is just window dressing. In Edge it is the spark for a little stream-of-consciousness riff in Marlie’s mind: “I pictured myself outlined like they do at crime scenes, only with black marker. Whoever owns this garage would cross my arms neatly before tracing me.” In this single image Tullson subtly ratchets up the tension. We’ve already seen how Marlie tries to make herself disappear and here she sees herself as two-dimensional. We’ve seen her low-grade, constant fear at school. Here we realize that this fear of victimization runs very deep. She has no hesitation in seeing herself as a corpse. And who is the garage-owner who would thus prepare her dead body? In the next paragraph he appears. It is Mike. He seems charming, hospitable, and kind but we sense, along with Marlie, that there is another story. It is this sort of careful construction that makes me take Marlie seriously, and makes me look forward to Tullson’s next offering.