When I was a teen-ager, in the mid-nineties, I didn’t read much young-adult fiction—I sought out books for grownups. This was not so much a reflection of my insatiable curiosity as an indictment of the Y.A. offerings of the era: “The Boxcar Children” and “The Baby-sitters Club” were popular then. Boys were led by hopeful librarians from “Encyclopedia Brown” to “The Hobbit.” But there was one teen novel that I borrowed from the school library and never forgot: “Shadow Man,” by Cynthia D. Grant. Published in 1992, “Shadow Man” has a simple plot, about an eighteen-year-old named Gabriel McCloud who dies in a drunk-driving accident. In its aftermath, his family and friends spiral through betrayals and revelations, each told from a different perspective—some teen-age, some adult.

Although “Shadow Man” was ostensibly about Gabriel, his many chroniclers were finely drawn, and one of them, Gabriel’s friend Donald Morrison, struck me the way that Holden Caulfield or Charlie from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” have for generations of kids seeking echoes of their own perspectives. Morrison, who works in a mortuary, complains about how he can’t get a date because of his job: “When girls find out what I do for a living, they don’t want me to touch them. As if death were contagious and could be caught by holding hands.” I didn’t work in a mortuary, but I felt that I had this same repellent power. Morrison was the first male I encountered in literature who seemed to understand his own unattractiveness. He was doughy and hopeless, and when he had dog feces thrown at him, his only comeback was “You got it on your hands!” I loved him.

Later in life, when I began writing young-adult novels myself, I resolved to re-read “Shadow Man,” remembering not only Donald Morrison but the book’s emotionally ambitious discussions of sex, alcohol, death, drugs, and politics—not typical topics in the genre at the time (or even now, in the case of politics). When I finally sought out the book this year, however, I found it lost to history. The same title is used by seven other books that top Grant’s “Shadow Man” in a Goodreads search. The publisher, Atheneum Books, merged with Scribner during the nineties, and never published a paperback edition. It has one review on Amazon (five stars). Suddenly, I wasn’t just a reader of “Shadow Man.” I was one of its only readers, and my desire to track it down became a mission.

The Los Angeles Public Library claimed to have the book, but only at the central branch. I went there on a Saturday with my wife and baby son. A librarian ordered up the novel from the stacks and told me that it was non-circulating: “It can’t leave this room.” Ten minutes later, I was holding it. One glance at the “Shadow Man” hardcover told me what I could not have known twenty years earlier: this book was a major effort on the part of its publisher. From the spectral cover to the starred review on the back, it was intended for a wide audience and, perhaps, awards. I was worried that the text wouldn’t hold up. However, the first sentence—“Something terrible has happened, but I don’t believe it”—held promise, and soon I was getting lost in “Shadow Man” just as I had as a teen, reconnecting with Donald Morrison’s precise yet ambivalent confessions: “People think I’m gay. I’m not. I don’t know what I am.” Unfortunately, I needed to leave—my son didn’t like hanging out in the library; he wanted to play on the escalators—and I couldn’t take the book with me.

My wife ordered a rare U.K. edition on eBay as I researched the book’s fate. The novel’s award chances were torpedoed by a negative School Library Journal review that took it to task for its “dysfunctional, emotionally crippled voices”—in other words, everything I’d loved about it. It was also released in a very different era for Y.A.: teen books did not have their own section at Barnes & Noble then, nor were they a proving ground for big-budget films. The only way for “Shadow Man” to reach a wide audience was through school libraries and the Scholastic Book Club, where its frank discussions of drugs, sexuality, and abuse were a tough sell.

The U.K. edition arrived. Reading “Shadow Man” as an adult, I found a grand and dark theme that had eluded me earlier. The multiple perspectives, which, for some academics, put it out of the field of Y.A. because it contains non-teen-age voices, set up a central conflict as true today that is as it was in 1992. Adolescence is war between parents and children. Adults accuse children of being irresponsible and over-dramatic; children accuse adults of being powerful and free; both sides are wrong, and neither wins. When I finished the book, I wanted to hear more about what had happened with its publication, but I knew I would only get answers from the author herself. Cynthia D. Grant has even less of an Internet presence than her novel. It took me some time to track her down, in Cloverdale, California—“the sticks,” as she calls it—where she has lived for the last forty years.

Grant is sixty-two. I was nervous when I called her. It had been a long time since I spoke to a writer who helped shape my consciousness. When she picked up the phone, I found myself speaking to a sharp-witted chronicler of days gone by, a coeval of authors such as Norma Fox Mazer and Betty Miles, and one who remembered when Y.A. was published in print runs of three thousand and only taken seriously by the people who wrote and edited it. Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, Grant started writing as a kid (“My grandmother used to publish my poems in the Brockton Enterprise”), dropped out of the San Francisco Art Institute (“I was going to be a filmmaker, just do it all, write it, direct it, and act in it myself, but I didn’t have the money”), and began submitting short stories, one of which was published in the feminist literary journal APHRA. When she turned to longer fiction, a friend noted the youthful focus of her work, and suggested that she submit to a children’s publisher. Her début, “Joshua Fortune,” was released in 1980; advances were very small at the time, and she was supported by a husband who encouraged her work. After a divorce, she began working day jobs to make ends meet. She has since remarried and become cynical about “damn near everything that’s out there right now” in Y.A. literature, but was happy to discuss the origins of “Shadow Man.”

“Probably ’86 or ’87, following my separation, I started working in a wrecking yard,” Grant explained. “Some of the men I worked with were very nice, but also very tortured, from this incredibly dysfunctional family. And I wanted to write about that family, but I also wanted to write from the viewpoint of all the people who are affected by people like that.” Grant published “Shadow Man” with her editor, Gail Paris, at Atheneum; she was an established author by that time, having won a PEN Award, for her novel “Phoenix Rising,” in 1991. She blames the popular failure of the book partly on its content—“I never wrote anything that was really commercial, and I think part of it was language”—but she seems more troubled by a perceived decline in the willingness of young-adult publishers to put out work she cares about.