Adolescence can be a battlefield. From family, school and neighbourhood clashes to finding support during actual warfare, these four new books for young readers involve characters caught up in very different turf wars.

In Jessica Green’s Theodork (Scholastic, $14.95 pb, 177 pp), the battleground is school. Theodore’s first day of Year Seven does not go well. He falls over and lands on a teacher, insults the first person he talks to in front of the whole class, and earns the nickname (his first of many) ‘Theodork’. It’s enough to make you long for primary school, where life was simple and everyone got along. But Theodore is not to be put off: he hatches plan after plan to put things right and make new friends, with predictably comic and catastrophic results. He apologises to the people he has insulted, befriends the nerds, improves at sport – but all his strategies backfire. Friendship, Theo decides, ‘has nothing to do with liking each other … It turns out that friendship is actually a strategy of defence in a war. The war of life.’