Even in a literary cosmos populated by teenage wizards and smart alecks, the characters in Meg Wolitzer’s first young adult novel might seem fantastical bordering on ridiculous. Kids obsessed with Scrabble? Who play in a national championship? With a first prize of $10,000? Come on.

Apart, however, from a protagonist with a magical power convenient for winning games, “The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman” is set in a world that is very real, and that Wolitzer knows well. Not only is she a tournament Scrabble player herself, one of her sons participated in the National School Scrabble Championship, which attracts 200 children to compete for a prize of, yes, $10,000.

Wolitzer gets the Scrabble right. She doesn’t shy away from lingo like “Betsy’s Feet” (a mnemonic for the letters that can be appended to KA to form acceptable three-letter words) or “bingo stem” (letters that can be combined with other letters to form words using all seven tiles).

But Scrabble is just a stage for Wolitzer’s empathetic and sometimes farcical exploration of the emotionally confusing lives of preadolescent boys and girls searching for identity. Duncan Dorfman and his down-on-her-luck single mom move to her hometown, Drilling Falls, Pa., where she works a low-wage job and buys him shirts in hues of mustard, ketchup and relish. (“It could be a set,” she says.) They live with her “box shaped” Aunt Djuna in a house with “squirrel colored” walls that smells of yams and beans, “the same way that the smell of brownie mix or roast chicken would float your way in other houses.” At school, Duncan is nicknamed “Lunch Meat” after someone slaps a piece of bologna on his back. “Life was joyless — that was the best word for it.”