Some years back, I wrote a positive review about a local author's first novel, a coming-of-age tale. A few months after it ran, we bumped into each other and had a beer.

I asked him, "Is it true that all first novels are autobiographical?"

He said, "Sure."

I said, "Well, your book has some pretty kinky stuff in it. How did you explain it to your wife?"

He paused, grinned and said, "I looked her straight in the eye and told her that I made it all up."

Let's hope that first-novelist Liza Monroy looks her mother straight in the eye and says the same thing about the misadventures of the teenage heroine in "Mexican High," a coming-of-age tale that's Monroy's debut novel.

After all, like the fictional Mila Marquez, the real-life Liza Monroy is the daughter of a woman who works for the State Department's Foreign Service. Like the fictional Mila, the real-life Liza went to a fancy high school in Mexico City in the '90s while her mother was on diplomatic service there. And like the fictional Mila, the real-life Liza is separated from her father and is trying to find him.

Let's hope than unlike the fictional Mila, the real-life Liza didn't shed her virginity on Page 41, discover drugs and drinking, and party late into the night for most of her senior year. It seems that among the elite teenagers in Mexico City, life is one big fiesta in a city noted for what Mila calls its "colorful chaos."

Monroy's book teems with the color and the chaos. Oddly, it kept me reading until the end. I say "oddly" because I'm far from my teenage years, was never a female and spent my senior year in a small Catholic high school in gritty little Rutland, Vt. In other words, Mila and I have nothing in common — except, maybe, a bent for a well-told story, one that somehow manages to come full circle.

These days, the talented Monroy is wrapping up a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University. Now that the autobiographical first novel is out of way, I'm looking forward to reading the second — the one in which she really has to make everything up.

In a debut novel about another young writer, "Troubled" may be too soft a tag to pin on 19-year-old Sam Marsdyke. He's the narrator and central character of "Out Backward," a young man who slouches in a corner among the rest of life's losers.

It seems that a few years back, Sam got booted from school for pressing his affection upon an unwilling schoolgirl. So now, he spends his life in isolation, on his father's sheep farm in England's Yorkshire.

Isolated, that is, until distraction comes along in the form of 15-year-old Josephine Reeves of a privileged London family that has bought a country home in this scenic corner of England. Sam had spent his days talking to sheep and sheepdogs. Now, he takes a fancy to neighbor Josephine, who seems to return the favor.

And that's enough about the plot, except to note that you know that Sam is getting in over his head and that the tale will end unhappily, which it does.

Still, the book by London resident Ross Raisin will grab you, despite its obstacles. For starters, few of us can identify with young Sam. He's moody, taciturn and country-boy clever but a long way from bright. And then, Sam relates his story in Yorkshire country dialect, where folks "gleb" (look) at "ramblers" (hikers) as they trek across the "floor" (ground) — and that's "no glibbing" (no fooling).

But context proves to be a workable translator. After a few dozen pages, readers will understand most of what Sam's saying. And in his sheep-farmer way, Sam has a lot to say about the class system, apparently still the bane of Britain. His Yorkshire reminds me of my native Vermont. Both places draw big-bucks, big-city people who buy up the northern land, marvel at the northern scenery — and scoff at the northern natives as bumpkins whose boots bear manure.

OK, Sam Marsdyke is no Holden Caulfield. But the ending of "Out Backward" leaves open the possibility of a sequel. And the possibility seems curiously pleasing.

Harry Levins of Manchester retired last year as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.