Nafkote Tamirat’s debut novel is a story of failure.

This isn’t a spoiler, because we meet the unnamed narrator, a girl in her late teens, and her father as they languish on some forsaken, palmy, unnamed island off the coast of east Africa. They’re there because of a man named Ayale. The book is the story of how this could have possibly happened.

The narrator has a hard life from the start. The American child of Ethiopian immigrants, she first lives with her mother, then is shunted off to her father. Both are majorly ineffectual as parents, and it is no wonder that the young woman is drawn to Ayale, the Ethiopian parking lot attendant of book’s title. She does her homework in the booth at his Boston parking lot and runs errands for him. He is kind and fatherly. He’s also much more than this—Ayale has plans, and none of them are good.

Tamirat has created fascinating and tragic characters. Ayale is charming, inscrutable, megalomaniacal and rotten to the core, and the narrator is a smart, bitter, tough girl—sometimes she carries on like a half-wild teenage boy—who knows that Ayale is bad but doesn’t care, or thinks she can handle it. She needs a father, because her real one doesn’t know what to do with her, doesn’t know how to succeed in America and ends up even more lost on the island.

All this makes the book seem dire, but it’s not. It’s often funny, with barbed, machine-gun dialogue worthy of Aaron Sorkin, but there’s a twist at the end. It happens so suddenly that you’ll miss it if you skip a few lines, but it plunges the tale into darkness. Everything has failed for the narrator: the love of her parents, their hopes for life in America, her friendship with Ayale, Ayale’s own screwy dreams and the island’s utopian vision. Everything has failed, that is, but the narrator. Because she’s the one who’s lived to tell the tale.

Readers learn several things very quickly in the first devastating pages of Rhiannon Navin’s debut. We learn that the narrator, Zach Taylor, is a 6-year-old boy. He is hunkered down in a closet with his teacher and classmates while a maniac shoots up their school. When the crisis is over, we learn something about his family: His mother, Melissa, does the family’s emotional work because his father, Jim, is constricted in ways that seem a throwback to Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit. Jim’s mother has taught Zach how to hold back threatening tears by pinching the bridge of his nose, much as we suspect she taught Jim. Then we learn that Zach’s older brother, Andy, has been murdered.

That’s the worst of it, but that’s not all of it. Nine-year-old Andy was not an easy kid to like, to say the least. The burden of dealing with their eldest son strained Jim and Melissa’s marriage, and it’s likely there were times that his family wanted him to get lost, at least for a few hours. How does a family pull itself together after the slaughter of someone they were a little ambivalent about? There are times when you fear that they won’t; it’s not a spoiler to say that Melissa nearly loses her mind from grief. How do the Taylor men, raised to be stoic, deal with any of this?

The title, Only Child, is clever in several ways. Andy’s death leaves Zach as his parents’ only child. He is also only a child and, like so many kids his age, inadvertently wise. His wisdom comes from innocence: The reader understands things that he can’t possibly fathom at his age. We know why his neighbor, a woman whose child also died in the massacre, stands in the rain wearing only her T-shirt. We can guess why Andy has a closed coffin during the wake. Zach, this bright kid who shares a name with a dull president, knows only that things are bad and he wants them to get better. He also knows what he has to do to make that happen.

Though Zach’s character could have benefited from being a little older, Navin succeeds in the tricky job of narrating her tale through the eyes of a young child. She views her characters with compassion, even as they are not on their best behavior. How could they be? Only Child shows the painful aftermath of a calamity that’s becoming all too common.

It makes sense that this debut novel, which speaks loudly and clearly to our troubled racial times, is set during the early years of the Clinton administration, when rap songs by Geto Boys and House of Pain were blasting from cassette decks all over Boston.

Green’s engaging, self-deprecating narrator is David Greenfield, “the white boy at the Martin Luther King Middle [School]. Well, one of two.” David’s “hippie parents” are big believers in public schools and in making sure David is exposed to a diverse range of people. None of which helps David endure daily humiliations—not only because of his race, but also because of his clothes, poor athletic skills and lack of friends. David’s family only aggravates him further—which is to say, they offer him quite a bit of guidance, but he’s unable to appreciate it. An unlikely friendship eventually blossoms between David and a black classmate named Marlon, which may or may not be doomed from the start, given their vastly different backgrounds. Along the way, there is plenty of comic relief, a love triangle and enough Celtics lore to please Larry Bird’s biggest fans.

Sam Graham-Felsen—who served as Barack Obama’s chief blogger in 2008 before earning degrees from Harvard and Columbia—imbues David’s voice with an infectious level of urban wit and slang, which only occasionally feels excessive. For better or worse, the narrative at times ventures into YA turf, yet Green’s examination of race, class, education and (most interesting of all) religion is weighty and substantial without being stuffy.

“I’m just sick of being nothing,” David says at one point. Yet as poor, befuddled David goes on (and on and on) trying to put together an identity for himself, he—like the reader—is inevitably floored when he takes the time to so much as glance at the adversity people like Marlon must endure every day.

It isn’t easy being the youngest child. And for Isidore Mazal, being the youngest is further complicated by the five people ahead of him. The elder Mazal kids are smarter than average—perhaps genius-level smart—and while he’s no slouch, Isidore has yet to skip a grade. He doesn’t love to read and thinks it’s weird when his siblings deploy “hopeful borrowing”—taking a book and hoping the owner won’t notice, thereby making the book property of the borrower.

Sometimes this odd-man-out mentality leaves the 11-year-old ready to run. He’ll pack his things and plot a way to escape from his family. Hopefully they’ll lift their noses from their books long enough to notice he’s gone. But if he isn’t there, who will notice them?

In her first English-language novel, French writer Camille Bordas examines a lost family from its youngest member’s point of view. Isidore observes his siblings at great length. Simone, only 18 months his elder, assigns him the task of writing her biography. It’s a job that requires him to ask many questions of his sister. Isidore extends his examination to others around him and begins to notice the things that go unsaid. His only friend, Denise, is obviously depressed and anorexic. Isidore turns to his German teacher, Herr Coffin, for insight into the field. It turns out Coffin isn’t so wild about teaching—Isidore’s chosen profession—after all. The Mazal family neighbor Daphne Marlott is poised to become the oldest living woman in the world when the two Indian women older than her die. After she becomes his German conversation partner, Isidore learns a long life may not be everything it seems.

Bordas draws complex characters who face the challenging and sometimes mundane issues of daily life. In the process, she prompts readers to look within.