Most traumatic Jacqueline Wilson book?

[Msblueskies]

Lighthearted… those who grew up on JW books in the 90s and 2000s which book was the most traumatic for you?

In my early 30s now and I absolutely adored all my JW books. But looking back a lot of the content was pretty dark 😅 I think for me Dustin Baby wins the prize for darkest and most traumatic at all. I read it at age 10!

This thread is making me want to download a load of the JW books onto my kindle!

Used to reread many of them over and over especially the girls in series, cliffhanger and the diamond girls

Mack the Smack from the Bed and Breakfast Star was a bit troubling.

@Snowinjulyy Biscuits was in cliffhanger and buried alive, along with Tim, tempted to redownload them as they were so funny

I developed a decade-spanning eating disorder following girls under pressure… really shouldn’t be the target market teenage girls!

Yes. As a PP upthread alluded to, back then although it would have been considered within the realms of "normal" ( Is there such a thing even?) Parenting, nowadays Mack would have been considered almost abusive in his treatment of Elsa. It wasn't even so much the smacking that bothered me when I read it, it was the way he barely tolerated Elsa, and didn't treat her anywhere near as nicely as his bio kids. It's hurtful for a kid growing up feeling like a nuisance to a parent, I think if Elsa had been a less confident child the authou r might have written her as a more troubled character with some trauma issues.

I think we can see in Jacqueline Wilson, some of her books have very overtly dramatically fucked up storylines (Falling Apart, Illustrated Mum, Love Lessons, Diamond Girls etc) but she is just as good at picking up on much subtler forms of childhood and adolescent problems. The kind of bad parenting that flies under the radar of social services even nowadays probably, does appear in many of her books and she writes it beautifully.

@MrsDoylesLastTeabag i loved the Stevie Day books, she sounded so cool. I have one somewhere still, about a school trip to Paris.

@MankyMinge I read 'The Butterfly Club' when I was nannying for a little girl, and thought it would be a bit mind-numbing as the main characters are only 7, but actually it was deeper than I thought. The 'sickly' triplet getting bullied by a classmate because she's jealous of how loved and cosseted she is, the classmate herself being bullied by her mother's partner.

My mum Tracy Beaker and We are the Beaker Girls?

I quite enjoyed them, not ground breaking literature, but nice to be back with "old friends"

JW "came out" (or rather spoke about it publicly) shortly before they came out and Cam finally gets a girlfriend.

There's a CBBC TV series of them too.

Yay! So pleased somebody else loved Stevie Day! I think my old JW paperbacks might be in boxes in the attic and I’m very tempted to go and look now…

Yes and in good old JW awkward style granny Cam's gf is Jess beaker's teacher. Spoiler alert not spoiler alert!

I think I remember that one. Didn't the hairdresser accidentally chop off the girl's hair and all the camp nicknamed her "Baldy"

I liked those ones. Tim's mum was annoying, she really babied him. I remember when they met up with Kelly's family and they were a bit "common" for want of a better word, Tim's mum was aghast.

That's right, it was a trendy new salon and she held her fingers a little apart to show she just wanted a tiny trim but the hairdresser thought she wanted that much left! 😱

I loved How To Survive Summer Camp, it doesn't seem to be as well known as some of the others but it's a lovely story. I've forgotten how it ends so that may have to be the first one I reread

A few years ago I wanted to try the adult colouring thing but found most of the books very dull. I bought a Jacqueline Wilson colouring book and really enjoyed it…

I wonder whether the JW version of the Faraway Tree came about because the main character in Queenie tells her own version of the stories to the other children on the ward? I can image someone from the EB estate reading it and having a lightbulb moment.

@Latenightreader I have always thought that.

I had totally forgotten How To Survive Summer Camp! Wasn’t the little girl called Stella?

I think JW definitely fed into my name obsession as a child- so many of the characters either had beautiful names or changed their names to nicer ones. And so many matching siblings (like Ruby and Garnet) which I always wanted to do when I had kids

My eldest is called Ruby and I begged DH to agree to call her little sister Garnet but he was having none of it

She very well might have been you know. I only ever read girls under pressure growing up so I didn't have all of the context but it wouldn't surprise me if she was 😬

She was.

Doesn’t Kelly’s mum get Tim’s mum drunk though and she starts to loosen up? 😂

There’s a bit in Buried Alive where JW describes Kelly and Biscuits walking over rocks on the beach barefoot and she compares Biscuits soft pale feet with Kelly’s tough suntanned ones. That section of the book lives rent free in my head whenever I have to walk over something rocky or uneven without my shoes on 😂😂😂.

She wrote about children's homes having never set foot in one.

She was so so wrong.

Yes. The only one I refuse to reread

Because of course it's only poor kids who have abusive families.

No stereotypes in there then?!