by JULIET WATERS

"It all started the night of Cherry's Prom. The day she dropped out of high school. That's when she fell in love. That's the night Cherry started blossoming into the hideous weedy monster I grew to hate."

With that opening, Mosh Pit could easily fall into the same category as other honest and brutal first-person teen narratives to come out in the last couple of years: Zoe Trope's Don't Kill the Freshman, or Melissa P's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. Kristyn Dunnion, however, has one important thing over both these writers. She's not a teenager.

Disclosure: I knew Dunnion when she was at McGill in the early '90s, so I can estimate her age, which gives me an edge over some journalists who've interviewed her recently. Despite the confessional tone of the book, her age is one thing she's not confessing, to the media anyway. On the back cover publicity shot she's sporting a fab mohawk and is described as a "saucy tart" who likes "big boots, shaved heads and loud music." There was no mohawk back in the days, but she was indeed a saucy tart with a very unique personality, which she's now turned into career as a Toronto burlesque star and a teen fiction writer.

I'm not pointing out Dunnion's age to expose her. If anything I think it makes Mosh Pit more impressive. There aren't many adults out there who could write a novel that cuts so close to the core of teenagehood. What's missing in the books by actual teenagers is perspective. Zoe Trope and Melissa P have their charms, but their relentless self-absorption is irritating to adults, and I suspect irritating to kids too. Dunnion has the character to keep the edge sharp in her story, but the maturity to frame it in the big picture.

Simone, the main narrator, is a nice balance between naïveté and wisdom beyond her years. The only child of a bipolar mother, she's a terrified, introverted, lesbian geek until misfit/vixen/bully Cherry decides to make her a friend. The plot is not unlike that borderline teensploitation film Thirteen. But while that was a cautionary tale against going over to the "dark side," this is a cautionary tale within the dark side.

Cherry is a precocious, tough little freak, able to exploit her youth for money and drugs - eventually for crack and even guns when she starts really veering out of control. But at many levels she's an idiot, as Dunnion nicely conveys through Cherry's cocky but naïve blogs about her burgeoining love for a skanky drug dealer.

Simone doesn't have the skills, or even really the desire for some of Cherry's more self-destructive plans, like their part-time job as teen wrestling sluts (they wear skin coloured leotards) on a Web site, for which they get paid $12 an hour. By the time she's been beaten up by a cop and fallen in love with a street-smart prostitute, she's got more than a little hard-earned wisdom under her belt. Fortunately she's found a sense of self, but one that allows her to find her place in this community, because for whatever reason it's where she needs to be right now.

Dunnion doesn't hold back on the scarier aspects of punk - the violence, the fuckheads, the inevitable crime and the older punks who are divided between the scary ogres exploiting an endless supply of young, naïve street kids and the wiser, decent sort who are able to offer them a bit more acceptance than they've been getting from wherever they came from. This is a fairly bleak teenage world reminiscent of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, but Dunnion adds some deft touches of magic. It's not a hardcore Harry Potter by any means. But it's old school in the best sense.

Mosh Pit by Kristyn Dunnion, Red Deer Press, pb, 270pp, $12.95