Jacqueline Wilson - thoughts?

[whattimeisitrightnow]

Posting in AIBU for traffic and also because there's another thread currently running here that's sort of about her works.
I grew up reading JW obsessively, really loved her work. If I'm honest, I'd probably still enjoy reading some of her books as an adult! However, now that I'm older I'm easily able to identify problems with a lot of them: some of it was my own fault, as I read the ones for teens/mature readers when I was too little for them.

That being said (talked about this on the other thread) there's one book, Love Lessons, based on a student-teacher relationship where said relationship is presented in an almost positive light, in a very romantic way. The female student is pretty much blamed entirely for what happens and is kicked out of the school while the teacher keeps his job. The abuse of power isn't explored at all. Generally, I think JW books really seek to give a voice to children, especially those in extremely difficult situations who might feel particularly powerless, and that's commendable. LL seems to be an exception.

What do people think of JW books? Did you enjoy reading them? Do you think they're too 'dark' for children? Did you even find them helpful at times? (I remember the ones with abusive parents really resonating with me, even before I was old enough to articulate why.) And do you let your own kids read them?

See I read love lessons quite young and I dont remember reading a love story. I remember being very angry at the ending, and the actions of the teacher making me feel uncomfortable.

I dont think JW books are trauma lit. I think they portray traumatic situations for children, but also show that children going through difficult situations also experience the same issues as other children like friendship/bullying etc.

Its not like a series of unfortunate events which is children whos parents die and then they are tortured and kidnapped by a strange man for 7 books. A little princess where shes basically made to be a slave etc. Im still scarred from reading a little mermaid! Lots of childrens books explore difficult themes.

I think basically its pure snobbery. But as a child who read a lot, what I liked about JW is all my friends were reading them too, and we could talk about it, lots of the other books I read no one else was reading. Because they are accessible to lots of children, they arent a difficult read but this means they interest a lot of children who otherwise wouldnt read.

@bettsbattenburg sounds like it was love lessons. Which is aimed at teenagers so yes its innapropriate for a 7/8 yr old child. But it doesnt mean JW books are bad because your child picked up a book aimed for children 7/8 yrs older than them!

I loved them too, I had divorced parents, step siblings ect so I identified with alot of her stories.
Love the suitcase kid and bad girls.
I think I loved them all! I remember vicky angel being really sad though.

[quote DishRanAwayWithTheSpoon]@bettsbattenburg sounds like it was love lessons. Which is aimed at teenagers so yes its innapropriate for a 7/8 yr old child. But it doesnt mean JW books are bad because your child picked up a book aimed for children 7/8 yrs older than them![/quote]
I don't remember but I think I'd have investigated more if a 7 year old brought a book home from school called Love Lessons. It was some years now - she's left university and is working now.

I liked her books and read loads of them but bloody hell some of them were pretty depressing if you look back on them 👀 dustbin baby etc.

I liked her books and read loads of them but bloody hell some of them were pretty depressing if you look back on them 👀 dustbin baby etc.

My Sister Jodie surprised me. It was my first exprience of suicide.

There’s no suicide in My Sister Jodie, it’s an accident.

JW books were incredibly important to me growing up. The Illustrated Mum was such an accurate depiction of life with a bipolar mum - the chaos, love, and beauty alongside the neglect. It truly was a huge part of my childhood and accepting my living situation and my mum's illness. It has also proved useful as an adult - a couple of years into my relationship with DH I asked him to read it so he would better understand my mum and my relationship with her. Truly a remarkable book.

I read the books as a child - Tracey beaker, girls in love, the suitcase kid, the lottie project, the bed and breakfast star, the double act, I really enjoyed them all although my favourite was the lottie project.
I didn’t really see myself in the books, but at the time I was last year of primary school and was reading a lot of fantasy fiction, so I considered it along the same lines, which is presumably why my mum allowed me to carry on reading them.

Idblow I would say the historical books are fine for age 10 upwards although the character of Hetty grows older in the trilogy and the third book felt more grown up and a bit of a teen book. Opal Plumstead is probably more of a teen one too - maybe 12+.
They are a good way of learning about history. I really enjoy social history and read a lot of (adult) novels set in the past. I have found it hard to find good children's books in recent years that are set in the past unless the plots are about a mystery or something. I like a good solid story that is about normal people and an experience in their lives but set in the past. I have found the JW historical books great for this.

Could someone put a link to the other thread that people have mentioned please. I can't find it and I am curious. Thanks.

@sadie9

One book the girl was being sexually assaulted by the mother's boyfriend. Maybe my DD wouldn't have got that, but it was very thinly disguised. Another book, some bloke was giving underage girls alcohol at a party and the girl said she liked it because it made her feel all funny and relaxed. There was nothing in the book to suggest that that wasn't a great way to behave. I found it weird. I complained to my library as all the JW books were in with the Rainbow Fairies and suchlike.

one book the girl was being sexually assaulted by the mother's boyfriend Really? which one? I have been an avid reader of JW since aged 10, in 1992 when The Story of Tracey Beaker was published. I was delighted when I went to secondary school and discovered in the library there that back in the 70s and 80s Jacqueline Wilson had been writing books for teenagers (I loved them- even better than her current ones) and also suspense and crime novels for adults too. I don't think there are any JWs that I have not read?

I do know that in Secrets, the mum's boyfriend physically assaults the character (a teenage girl named Treasure) but no sexual abuse in any of the books except Love Lessons as far as I'm aware.

@KerbsideViolet

I’m glad other people have said they’re exploitative. That’s always the word I’ve used to describe them.

I had a pretty traumatic upbringing and well-meaning adults would give me her books to read. I suppose I was a very impressionable child (probably because of my background) but the books left me feeling worse. I’d read about characters feeling desperate, or abandoned, or unloved in my situation and it made me feel like I was supposed to feel the same way. I hadn’t realised anything was wrong with my home life until I read the books and it became clear I was “supposed” to feel bad about it.

I also remember how Ellie in the Girls in Love series was described and drawn exactly as I looked, with lots of lovely descriptions about how fat her legs are and how unattractive she was. I didn’t wear skirts for a long time after reading that.

My grandma felt the same way and once said (regarding adults buying the books for children in the situations depicted) “It seems to me she’s made a nice amount of money off the back of children’s trauma”. I’m not sure if that’s fair- I have no idea how much money she’s earned and for all I know, she could donate a lot of it- but I understand her point.

I love her books but I can also see how they could make someone feel worse. Many of the books I loved because they wer every validating (Ellie's experience of Binge eating Disorder as described in Girls Under Pressure- before Ellie starves herself she describes perfectly the experience of acompulsive eater- after her mum dies she feels a void and tries to fill it with food. As someone with BED, I have never seen it described so well in a YA novel), and the bullying and feeling insecure.

However I read Cookie as an adult and found it too close to home. I had a dad like Beauty's and was finally in therapy beginnign to admit the truth that what happened to me was abusive. I wasn';t ready for Cookie. I did manage Lola Rose but was glad that the bits with the dad in that one were brief.

I loved them growing up. Vicky Angel and the illustrated mum were my favourites.
Vicky Angel resonated because I'd had a friend who died young. Not a bff like the girls in the book, but the pain was unreal.
Sadly there are times now when I identify with the Mum in Illustrated Mum. I'm not quite as mentally unstable as her but...

ANYWAY....
I loved that most of her main characters had divorced parents. Because I did. And so many other books at the time didn't portray that. So it made it seem more 'normal'

My DS' have read some of them.

lordjesus ooh I hardly ever hear someone mention her rare out of print adult crime books from the 70s. I have only managed to track down 3 books. I think she wrote 4 or 5? Also only have managed to track down one of the teen books from the 80s (her first one "Nobody's Perfect"). I would love to find the rest.

Diamond girls, Girls under pressure, Vicky Angel, are a few that I remember off the top of my head, the former being my favourite. I loved JW as a tween, as you say, the fact that they are showing different sides of the story, giving voices to situations many children, predominantly girls, go through.
To the person saying its trash, I never read it that way. I saw it as hardships, and i was always rooting for the main character, as well as the other unfortunate characters, not revelling in their miseries.
I just looked up love lessons and remember it now... I mean, its a difficult one. I think at the time, I could see that everything in Prues situation was wrong, although, I kind of liked him during most of the book, he seemed like a nice guy, which now I see is completely wrong. it wasn't until the end where he puts all the blame on her where i started to dislike him, so actually, yeah, you're right. I wonder what JW has to say about people misinterpreting it. I think if JW would have made a character, especially one of her friends or/and her parents, point out what it is that this was, grooming and coersion, then perhaps it would be different.

DD has read all of them and bloody loves her, she loves a bit of tragedy in her books. The historical ones have always spurred her into researching the different time periods, broadening her interest in history too. She reads a massive range of other books as well -nothing wrong with a bit of balance and a glimpse into other, very real, lives.

@bookmum08

lordjesus ooh I hardly ever hear someone mention her rare out of print adult crime books from the 70s. I have only managed to track down 3 books. I think she wrote 4 or 5? Also only have managed to track down one of the teen books from the 80s (her first one "Nobody's Perfect"). I would love to find the rest.

I have been finding some in second hand bookshops or charity shops, also e-bay UK is very good. I loved Nobody's Perfect, I think Amber, Deep Blue and Waiting For The Sky to Fall were my favourites

Actually, other than Cookie and Love Lessons, in some fo her old books (the 70s/80s teen ones she wrote) there are emotionally abusive or angry dads- Waiting For The Sky to Fall has a dad very like Prue's- no homeschooling but the main character Katherine is "gifted" and her father bullies her into getting briliant O-Level results, also insults her mother for being very obese and her younger sister Nicola for being not very bright. Deep Blue is another old one about a gifted child (a competititve diver in training) whose dad pushes her hard to excel and actually is abusive to her in the book when she gives up diving and develops anorexia.... Looking back at that last sentence, I can see how it might appear that some of JW's books are "misery lit" for teens but they really are not- the endings aren't always simple happy endings but there usually is some resolution there too...
Funny enough I could read those and enjoy them but Cookie was just too much like my own life (I also was fat and struggled to make friends and my father treated my mum horribly as well...

When I read Jacky Daydream, the autobio of JW, she hinted that her own father had a temper and was someone you didn't argue with. She mentions no explicit abuse but I could easily believe that she draws on some of her experiences in her writing regarding fathers who are very strict and irascible, like Prue and Katherine's fathers.

Interesting thread. I adored the books as a child although I can’t remember what age I read them at. I’d always felt I wasn’t keen on my daughters reading them but this thread has actually changed that.

I’ve just ordered Dancing the Charleston to read with them as it fitted into their age bracket when I searched the website. I’ve not read that one so it’ll be nice to read another of her books all these years later.

I was a parent volunteer when DS was in Y4 and part of my duties were to see what books children were reading and ask them to do a book review with me. Most of the girls were reading JW, but I found that most of them missed the point of the stories eg one girl had read The Bed and Breakfast Star and told me the family had gone on holiday. Not sure whether this was because most of the girls in the school would not have experienced many of the life experiences JW was writing about.

But there are also decent dads in the books, and just as many awful mothers. I don’t think it’s an inherent sexism more than reflecting the real world - after all, most single parent families are headed by women - but Wilson doesn’t present them as saints but often as lazy, selfish, feeble or vulnerable.

And the characters are rarely presented as one dimensional. The dad in Deep Blue for instance pushes his daughter far too hard but you can also see that he absolutely adores her. That’s the thing with parents who end up troubling their child: it isn’t that they don’t love them, but in that case, he tries to show that love through living her life for her which of course you can’t do. Likewise in a more modern example the dad in Clean Break is worshipped by the kids and he isn’t abusive but weak and foolish and selfish.

There are also some touching examples of father/daughter relationships and of downright good eggs in the male cast, if you like. The dad who turns up in the illustrated mum is presented as thoroughly decent, Mandy’s dad in Bad Girls is lovely, the ‘hero’ in Dustbin Baby is the teenager (now grown man) who found the baby.

I don’t think it’s an anti male agenda at all, but a theme that does run through a lot of the books is adults perhaps loving their children in their own flawed ways, but for a variety of reasons being unable to really put them first.

Such an interesting thread! I read some JW when I was younger and also managed the YA section of the library when I worked there - and on the whole I'd say that although pretty much all her books deal with traumatic themes, actually they give a voice to children who won't see themselves in the more traditional children's literature.

Books are a great way to start conversations about awkward topics - at school one of our required reads was Junk by Melvin Burgess. Very much of its time, and criticised for glamorising drug use, but actually I remember conversations about drugs and consequences and reasons people might try them - I'm not sure how else we would have had those conversations as young people.

Books that feature very different characters to your own experience can be really good for adults as well as children.

So I reckon JW wins on both counts. "Trash" is just snobbery, books are supposed to be read and they can't all be highbrow.

Having said all that I've not read Love Lessons and echo PPs feelings that it should perhaps have a different ending by the sounds of it?

I loved JW (still do a bit!) and I actually reread Love Lessons recently. I was quite surprised the latest time I read it as I had remembered the story as the girl fancying her teacher but it wasn't reciprocated, but it was surprising to read it again and find that they both seemed to love each other, even though she was only 14(?).

However I don't think the girl was blamed - the two of them needed to be separated and Pru was told the teacher would have to leave the school if she didn't so she was just doing a decent thing. It wasn't to punish her, it was to stop the relationship. Kind of surprised the teacher didn't get into trouble with the law though, the relationship was inappropriate!

No, she is blamed - the headteacher starts going on about her wearing inappropriate underwear in PE and stealing other girls’ boyfriends.