Discoveries : CAPTURE THE FLAG; By Rebecca Chace; Simon & Schuster; 280 pp., $23 : THE LAST LIFE; By Claire Messud; Harcourt Brace; 352 pp., $24 : MIND OF THE RAVEN; By Bernd Heinrich; HarperCollins; 380 pp., $25

So much fiction, particularly first novels, is about adolescence. There are a number of possible reasons for this, including a generation of creative writing professors who chant: “Write about what you know!” The only thing a twentysomething writer can really be certain of is the previous decade. A better reason might be that adolescence is a completely fascinating time, when the future means all of the next 15 minutes, and so each minute sparkles and is its own powerful fulcrum. The world is vivid, often for the last time. Rebecca Chace’s writing is infused with this brightness. The teenagers in the two intertwined families she writes about are smart, observant, noble kids. Their parents are self-indulgent inner teddy bears. In its observations of family life, Chace’s writing resembles a generation of New York writers heavily influenced by John Updike: Rick Moody, A.M. Homes, Susan Minot and, more recently, Melissa Bank and Julia Slavin. Chace’s two families return each year to an upstate New York country house to play capture the flag, the Edwards vs. the Shanlicks. Annie Edwards, our narrator, is 11 when the novel opens and 16 when it ends. The families are woven together by a web of sexual relationships that grows increasingly complicated as the children get older. Parents divorce and remarry as if they expected to and taboos are broken with such regularity that one wants to take the list of characters on the frontispiece and draw lines between them to map incest and deceits that may become important in later life. But there is so much compassion in Chace’s people that these broken taboos only bring the children closer, and this is a sweet and juicy thing, a lack of criticism and judgment that exists in families at their best.

The privileged classes have a little longer, but the outside world starts cracking the whip at 18. Watching these kids guide themselves through adolescence while their parents drink and make money is like a visit to Narnia, all expenses paid.

THE LAST LIFE; By Claire Messud; Harcourt Brace: 352 pp., $24

Here is another novel of adolescence, of interstices, but with a slightly wider horizon than “Capture the Flag.” Claire Messud’s main character, Sagesse, is 14 when the novel, which is set in the south of France, colonial Algeria and New England, opens. She is caught not only between childhood and adulthood, but between parents, between continents (Africa, Europe and North America) and, most piercingly, between the world of normal healthy children and her brother, Etienne, who is mentally retarded and uses a wheelchair. He becomes, for Sagesse, a symbol of this period in her life, trapped as he is with the same memories, impulses, desires and no way to act on them.

Sagesse’s adolescence is spent trying to understand how her parents and grandparents became the people she depends on less and less for survival: her mother, an American unhappily married to a philandering Frenchman; her overbearing grandfather, who owns the fancy hotel where her father works and who, in his rage, brings shame on the entire family; her father, who will not talk about things he saw growing up in Algeria; her grandmother, who with her dignity and loyalty holds the family together. This process of parsing one’s family history as a teenager, before entering the world, is similar to what the Americans do in Chace’s novel. Sagesse, like Annie in “Capture the Flag,” must triumph over her mother’s depression, go new places, make her own mistakes.

MIND OF THE RAVEN; By Bernd Heinrich; HarperCollins; 380 pp., $25

Bernd Heinrich is a professor of biology and the author of several naturalist classics, including “Ravens in Winter,” “A Year in the Maine Woods” and “Bumblebee Economics.” He is one of the finest living examples of that strange hybrid: the scientist writer. He builds to the miraculous in his subjects. He watches and listens and includes his own efforts, his own learning curve in the telling. He provides, through ravens or bumblebees or whatever he happens to be looking at, new definitions for words like mind, consciousness and intelligence and breathes new life into them. In this book, after decades of studying ravens, raising them, living with them, traveling around the world to meet them, Heinrich hopes to engage the reader to “participate in the quest of exploring another mind.” He travels to Alaska (where ravens, he discovers, have larger brains) and Germany and to the Inuit community of Iqaluit west of Greenland, where he talks with old hunters who describe how the ravens have traditionally helped the humans find their prey. He studies individual recognition, vocal expression, discovers ravens’ ability to distinguish between friends and foes, that they recruit other ravens to share food not from the bait, but from roosts which act as information centers. He experiments with ravens adopting other ravens’ babies and questions the truism that ravens mate for life and are monogamous. He studies the importance of novelty and boredom in young ravens’ education, their playfulness and their morals. “We’ll never find proof of the existence of consciousness by picking the animal apart,” he writes. All I know is that no definition of God has ever made me feel as comfortable, small and important in the universe as Heinrich’s insight into the mind of the raven.