Authenticity of voice is one of the key components of a successful YA novel. Attuned as they are to the minute linguistic shifts of their all-important peer groups, young readers will spot a misused “dude” or “chill” or song lyric and toss the book aside without a second thought.

If voice were the sole criterion for YA fiction success, Matt Beam’s novel Last December would be an early candidate for book of the year. (Beam’s photographic picture book collaboration with Joanne Schwartz, City Alphabet, was a Q&Q book of the year for 2009.) The first-person narrative, told by 15-year-old hockey-goalie wannabe Steven, is pitch-perfect in its vocabulary and serpentine, bizarrely lyrical sentences and dialogue: “I used to think that the big soft snowflakes made the outside warmer, because that’s kind of the way it feels, but Mr. Davis told us once that warm air holds more moisture, which is a dorky scientific word that means ‘water’…”

Steven has a new high school and a crippling crush to deal with, plus his unlucky-in-love mother is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child and needs her only son to start being the man of the house. When Steven befriends the charismatic Byron, a deeply troubled older boy who draws Zen life lessons from video games, readers are set up for a very “inside” look at coming to terms with responsibility, friendship, sex, and individuality.

That Beam chooses to subvert a few of the coming of age genre’s often rigid narrative conventions works in the book’s favour. More problematic is the novel’s over-reliance on Steven’s unique voice to achieve its effects. The book is cast as a long, rambling letter to Steven’s unborn sister; its manic tone hints that it may be a suicide note explaining the boy’s reasons for saying goodbye.

Unfortunately, the story Steven tells is not exactly rich in incident or tension. And Byron, whose own struggles are meant to trigger Steven’s descent, is never developed into a major character. Indeed, few of the other cast members really shine through the fog of the narrator’s realistic, but at times overwhelming, self-absorption.

Even teen readers can get too much of a good thing.