OPTIMISTS DIE FIRST By Susin Nielsen (Tundra, 226 pages, $21.99, ages 12-14)

Youth Art Therapy (YART for short) meets The Breakfast

Club — sort of — in Nielsen’s new YA novel, in which Petula’s gloomy anxieties about risk cause so much trouble that she’s sentenced to weekly art therapy with a motley cluster of variously traumatized teens.

Petula’s anxieties stem from her sense that she’s responsible for her baby sister’s death two years earlier, a conviction she can’t shake until she meets, then falls for, YART’s newest conscript, Jacob.

Jacob’s understanding, affection, and even more his great ideas for therapeutic art projects, set Petula firmly on the path to better mental health — until a revelation about his own back story puts everything into question. Nielsen’s a snappy, smart writer and this story fairly bowls along, enlivened by its savvy references to movies and actors, weird craft ideas, humour and inventive film projects. Its extensive array of social and psychological traumas is rather neatly resolved, but Nielsen carries it off with compassion and verve.