It bums me out so much that the YA Dystopia genre is basically dead beyond Hunger Games spin-offs. I think we need them now more than ever.

I always think the YA dystopia trend died out because it’s too much like a dystopia out here now. Even taking out stuff happening globally, the average western kid whose going to read these books today lived out a good chunk of their education through a computer screen and probably spends 10 hours a day doomscrolling. They also have very little hope of ever owning a home or finding a job in future and perhaps won’t even have the option to do college in the future, so I doubt they want to read about people getting screwed over by a harsh society for fun.

What I always found strange is how so little YA dystopia actually features the internet or social media in their books, despite being published in the 2010s for the first generation to truly become chronically online. As far as I can find, Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky (AKA Katie Ray) is the only YA dystopia book explicitly about the internet.

Published in 2011, Awaken is a relatively little known YA dystopia with just 15k logs on Goodreads. It takes place in 2060 and imagines a future where everything is automated, eg nobody uses physical media, everything is downloaded, nobody actually does anything because they can get it all online. The major conflict of the book is that in this dystopian world kids have to attend school completely online over computer screens… which obviously happened in real life during Covid and is portrayed as totally unthinkable and bleak in the book.

My parents sat me down in front of what would become my future world, a giant wall screen. I was introduced to Millie, my new kindergarten teacher. She smiled and introduced me to all my new fiends who were all digital images, smiling and waving back at me. I thought it was so entertaining. School became one long television show. - Awaken, page 159.

Katie Kacvinsky herself commented on this parallel in a blog post in 2020 where she revealed she was currently a teacher overseeing digital school, the very thing she sought to destroy;

[Covid] really makes me think of my debut novel, AWAKEN. Not only are we all isolated in our homes, but we have to attend digital school. We interact, learn, socialize, and even work-out online. We are not allowed to go out and gather in groups for fear of getting sick. This is true in AWAKEN, although the fear is spread much deeper than sickness. It has spread to people’s cores, and they fear human kind itself.

This is an odd comment for Awaken since most of the characters are pretty social. For a book supposedly about a society that’s isolated themselves the book is pretty damn social. In Awaken, the main character goes to coffee shops, youth groups, libraries, football games, red carpet events and more. It’s far from a world where people fear humanity itself. There’s an entire chapter where the characters go to a big charity ball in person, surely this would have been a good chance to have them do that over video call like the 2020 Oscars. But it’s only really school that’s completely moved online and the book topples around that.

The main character, Madeline, isn’t anywhere as near as antisocial and neurotic as the average zoomer today despite having an apparent chronically online upbringing. She does play sports and has a few non-online friends. The early chapters touch on her having anxiety and not wanting to be around people because she’s curated a particular online image and is scared for people to know the real her. But that seems to fade quickly and she comes out of her shell pretty easily after meeting her love interest.

Maddie comes from a life of immense privilege. Her father is the ‘director’ of Digital School Inc, a free education system that covers the united states in this future. Despite being from wealth, Madeline has ties to an anti-digital school terror cell like a kind of 2060 Patty Hearst. We’re told she met some Anti-Digital School protesters in a chatroom and gave them the coordinates for the DS Radio Towers, which were used for a terror attack.

[The rebels] were caught after blowing up a tower outside of Portland, which provided DS to the entire state of Oregon. Before the protesters could be stopped, coordinates were leaked out and two more towers were bombed in California. Awaken, page 37.

The angle of the Digital School Protesters really irritated me. It’s not as though these kids are totally isolated slaves plugged into a computer all day against their will. We literally see that there’s an option to go to in-person study groups if you want to and sports clubs are still running. They also establish the reason why digital school rose, wasn’t a disease but a horrific terror attack.

In universe, the digital school push was in response to school shootings, which was really interesting considering the fact that most school shootings now are caused by the internet. It’s worth mentioning that supposedly these weren’t just school shootings but a coordinated effort by a terrorist group called The Spades.

Seventeen elementary schools were bombed on that single day, all within the same hour, on all sides of the country. Ten thousand children died. In one single hour. Awaken, page 151.

With their name alone, I assumed The Spade would have been some flavour of neo-nazis, but apparently anti-natalism was the motive. The Spades lore is just infodumped on us and then brushed under the rug. Who were the spades? Where did they come from, how did anti-natalism as a movement get so bad 10,000 children were nuked in one hour? They’re lucky that this didn’t cause all out war and that the government was able to come up with a peaceful solution with digital school.

Speaking of peace, it’s also dumped on us that all the countries on the world agreed to put an end to war and they have known peace since. I wish I was joking. And guns as a whole were put out to pasture- now apparently guns only fire tranquilizers. I have no idea why Katie put this worldbuilding in, what is she trying to say? How is this a dystopia again? A society that literally manufactured world peace?

As such, it makes the ‘rebel’ group in this book really unlikable. They want to overthrow a peaceful regime that created education equality for all so they can go back to playing with guns and going to prom. The rebel’s entire ideology ‘this reliance on technology sucks because it’s boring and we aren’t going to enough parties and we aren’t looking at the sunrise!’ They don’t mention the actual issues that could be risen by kids being more online. Becoming desensitized, becoming more bigoted, becoming more antisocial, culture dying, the job market in a society where educators and probably countless others have been made obsolete?

After all, 2011 was a time where the internet was pretty brutal. This was an age of trolling and shock videos. There was a lot of panic about exploitation and cyberbullying regarding teens at the time. Sadly the book doesn’t touch on that kind of thing. Madeline doesn’t talk about having scary experiences on the internet, being bullied or seeing gore or seeing misogyny or dealing with creeps.

It instead comes repeatedly from the perspective of ‘The internet is bad because you need to get out of the house more!” again and again. I get the feeling that this is someone who isn’t all that in touch with internet culture making a comment on the internet.

I couldn’t find all that much info about the author’s background and what might have inspired this. Most of the statements she’s made about it in interviews are pretty general, and she doesn’t really say so much why technology is bad just that it is bad.

I think we’re heading for a scary future. We spend more time on the computer every day. President Obama plans to make wireless internet available to 98% of households around the country. That’s great, but it also shows how digitalized we’ve become. (Source)

With this book I have to ask; what is the Awaken rebel uprising’s endgame? Ban social media for teens, force them to all play in the yard every day? Because that is kind of what the UK government is actually doing! Banning social media for under 16s and restricting their freedom even further, making them more vulnerable to abuse, in the guise of ‘giving their childhoods back’ Thanks a lot, Awaken rebel uprising.

In 2011, the fearmongering about social media was already there. South Korea had social media restricted for minors and the UK had discussed shutting social media down during times of ‘unrest’. Yet somehow in this book it’s the rebels who want to shut down a network of communication.

Madeline spends most of the book falling in love with Justin, an anti-social media drifter who goes off on long speeches about how we need to get off our phones and like, start living, man. He comes off as a bit of a bum giving that he’s a 20 year old sofa-surfer sniffing around a 17-year-old girl.

One problem that starts unfolded is that this book doesn’t need to take place in 2060. The dystopian setting hardly plays into it after Justin shows up. He and Madeline just go to coffee shops, hop trains, bum around and talk about how phony social media is and how deep they both are. It could just as easily take place in 2011 and be about the daughter of some stuffy politician slumming it with a bunch of crust punks. It would probably make more sense.

The politics of this book are really skewed. I looked at interviews with Katie to see what she was getting at, and I’m not sure if it is a larger social commentary beyond ‘kids be on their phones’ In an interview with a blog called Musings of a YA Reader, Kacvinsky said “If you’re not part of the new digital age, you might as well drop out of our culture” Which is true. She could have written about that kind of issue and the othering and alienation social media could do. But the book spends most of the time positioning Digital School as this big problem.

Digital school should be a choice, not a mandate. We should have alternatives: real schools, digital schools, private schools, small schools, public schools, home schools, alternative schools, schools in airplanes, schools on the sea, I don't care. Awaken, page 60.

If anything, it sounds like the digital school has made it all more equal if public and private schools have been abolished. This literally means (presumably) everyone is getting the same quality education.

And kids wouldn’t be the ones making these choices anyway; their parents would be. No kid actually chooses themselves whether to be homeschooled or to be in private school or to be in public school, it’s entirely the adults in their lives who decide. Awaken’s society has created a world where kids aren’t as dependent on their parents and all get an equal playing field in schooling. And that’s a bad thing because they should be playing dodgeball?

There is apparently a thing about digital school where kids are arrested for trying to drop out of school but that doesn’t seem like technology is the issue but a problem which could still happen in a world where school was physical.

“One hundred percent of the children and young adults in this country receive a free education with the free resources necessary to make their lives and this world a better place. Every child and young adult in this country has access to a safe, challenging, secure educational program that is the finest this world has ever offered and will ever offer. American students currently test the highest in the world. This program is working and it will continue to work. Digital school has made education what it’s intended to be and America has never been safer for our children.” - Awaken, page 67.

Is he wrong?? It seems like all this man did was pioneer educational equality. I don’t really think the digital school sounds like a bad thing at all. Is Madeline a radical capitalist who is bitter she hasn’t been able to enjoy immense privilege at some private school because the education system has been made equal?

"Teenage shootings and deaths have fallen sixty-seven percent since 2048, when this program was initiated." The audience interrupted my dad with a celebratory roar. "Teenage recreational drug use has fallen sixty-six percent." Again, he paused for the applause. "Since the implementation of this program, teenage suicide has fallen forty-five percent.”

TEENAGE SUICIDE HAS FALLEN FORTY-FIVE PERCENT? Jeez, that was the one place you could go with it, that teens are lonely and killing themselves due to a lack of normal interaction but clearly it’s the opposite.

Justin’s rebel group comes off repeatedly like a strange cult with an almost religious opposition to technology who want to burn it all down for selfish reasons. Digital school ended the constant death and carnage and created education equality for everyone. This whole passage showed me what the book COULD be. It could argue that violence has increased since DS came about, kids are killing themselves, killing their parents, that child abuse as home has increased but it doesn’t. DS was the best possible solution for what was happening.

This book just doesn’t commit to it’s own thing. I assumed this would be kind of like the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits where everybody spent their life plugged up in their own little cube with everything virtual. But it basically looks like an everyday world where people have to attend classes via zoom but everything else is just the same. We don’t really see any of the kids actually have trouble interacting or have any kind of harmful brainrot from spending their life online.

I think this book really sold itself short by becoming a dystopia because it becomes bloated with a cliche uprising plot which doesn’t feel justified in the world of the book. It could just as easily take place in 2011 and be about a disenfranchised criminal rich girl who is glued to her laptop and falls in with strange communities. The parts of this book I most enjoyed were the observations on the internet;

I was just this girl, sitting behind a screen being tricked into thinking I was experiencing something. - Awaken, page 132.

Eventually, Madeline is almost sent to juvie for breaking parole but escapes. She runs away with Justin and hides out with him in a safe house. This whole scenario plays out a lot like some cult grooming.

he said. "We kill their digital lives and help them start real ones. Help them relocate and get back on their feet. Think of it as being a born-again human." - Awaken, page 169.

Literally imagine if you were a vulnerable 17-year-old runaway and a 20-year-old man took you to a squat house and made you delete all your social media while telling you he was going to make you a born-again human. Absolutely absurd. If this was set in 2011, everyone would see how weird it is. To Awaken’s credit, Madeline seems to realise how weird it is but there’s still this staunch lens of “This is the rebellion and it’s the right thing”

I think it would be pretty interesting for a dystopia story to touch on a character being radicalized into what they think is a rebellion but is really just a cult. After all, the rebellion isn’t always the ‘good guys’, modern neo-nazi and incel communities see themselves as a rebellion against a government they think of as oppressive. The rebels in Awaken are a strange fringe bunch with no actual qualms against digital school other than that it’s boring as fuck, so lets just blow stuff up and fly out a bunch of teenage girls and make them pledge to never use technology again.

I’m not a very romantic person so usually with romance subplots I don’t know what to say. Justin and Madeline’s romance feels very strange once we get to the safehouse. He keeps her in the basement, teaches her to do basic things. Apparently she didn’t even know how to make a sandwich because of her fancy automated kitchen. Despite all his pushiness for Maddie to cut off all technology he has a damn phone. I don’t like Justin. He just seems like a narcissist who grooms teenage girls, tells them that the system is so corrupt and he needs to save them and cut them off from their family so they can live a real life with him.

his earpod was always in and he was always mumbling into it. I didn't want to bother him so I kept to myself. Without my phone, computer, or flipscreen I didn't know what to do. No music, no chatting, no television. I didn't want to complain but a simple TV would have been appreciated. Awaken, page 190

Yeah, this isn’t weird or abusive at all. Nor is it a terrible power imbalance that Madeline is a runaway who can’t go back home now without being sent to juvie and has become totally dependent on him to keep her safe and can’t even eat food without his help. What the hell. Maddie eventually moves in with Justin’s kindly hippie parents who don’t particularly question him bringing a vulnerable 17-year-old to their house and sleeping with her.

Madeline attends an anti-digital school protest with the group where the protesters make incredible points like;

"Since digital school was established, people spend ninety-five percent less time communicating face to face," she yelled. "American parents spend eighty-five percent less time with their children. DS ISN'T FIXING OUR PROBLEMS. IT'S JUST CREATING BIGGER ONES." - Awaken, page 253.

Bigger ones than constant terror attacks and school shootings? This is honestly insane. I really hate how the book can’t see beyond ‘phone bad’ and act like digital school is this terrible idea. There’s less death, less suicide. The things that could be negatives like increased child abuse are hardly touched on. It’s all just hippie nonsense, digital school is bad because we can’t all just hang out and be friends.

Eventually Maddie is recaptured and taken to live with her adult brother. Her brother reveals her parents knew she was with Justin and were okay with it because they didn’t really want her to go to juvie. Justin comes back and tells her he loves her but must go, and she must move on. Is there even an antagonist in this book? Why does everything work out so well? What the hell was that?

I had expected a book about a dystopia, but instead I got a very strange coming-of-age novel about a privileged girl who runs off with her hippie boyfriend and then comes home and it all works out. This is pretty clearly a writer who didn’t want to write a dystopia but was probably pushed to since it was trending at the time. After all, the rest of Katie’s books are contemporary romance. The book struggled on every front of social commentary and made really no move to analyse the structure of this world or even really commit to its own premise.

The strange part is this book somehow managed to grow into a trilogy because every dystopia novel had to be a trilogy. It looks as though the later installments weren’t enjoyed by fans much anyway. I don’t know if there are any major twists about the world which might make it look like I was all wrong and it actually is super bad. If there is I’m sorry. But I’ve never read a dystopia that struggled so much to make its world look bad and made me wonder what the hell the author believes politically. Does this book even fit into any of the four dystopias?

I think the biggest problem is that ya dystopias struggle so much to see beyond the scope of Stuffy old man government vs Kickass rebel teenagers. At least Hunger Games had more nuance of the rebel group being quite brutal themselves. Awaken is simple wish fulfillment to the point it forgets what its premise even is. Mean old dad tells you to go to totally lame digital school, let’s run away with a dreamy guy who wants to burn down the system (despite this world being a complete utopia?)

Ever since I began making Jacqueline Wilson parody skits on TikTok (apparently my life now) I was asked a lot about the book Girls Under Pressure. Mainly I see people saying that GuP gave them an eating disorder. Which is interesting considering this text exists as a ‘Teenage Problem of the Week’ book battling the issue of bullimia and ideally encouraging young women not to spew.

Rather than creating an original character in an eating disorder book, Jackie gives bullimia to pre-existing anti-heroine Ellie Allard. The self-loathing star of the ‘girls’ franchise, including Girls In Love, Girls In Tears, Girls Out Late. Most of these books have a Problem of the Week format, often delving into issues such as sexual pressure and drugs. I’ve talked a lot about Ellie Allard and her horrific self-crucifying. She’s often positioned as fat and ugly and completely unconfident compared to her two ‘MODEL-GORGEOUS’ besties, Magda and Nadine. But Jackie never supposedly envisioned her as fat. In her own words;

I didn’t want [Ellie] to be a super-girl with a fabulous figure and absolutely everything going for her. I decided she’d be an ordinary comfy girl size – so she’d worry a bit about getting fat.

‘Comfy girl’ has to be the most backhanded thing I’ve heard in a while. But while Ellie is not supposed to be obese or even a big girl, she navigates the world as one. The Girls series reminds me a lot of Mad Fat Diary. There’s a contrast between Ellie and Nadine, her long time best friend, who is a beautiful stick-thin goth. While Nadine is constantly pursued by boys Ellie is left behind, derided, mocked, insulted and designated as the ugly friend, usually becoming the one to protect her when the boy she dates turns nasty. Ellie is degendered. She becomes not so much one of the girls but an asexual, sensible protector and mother hen to Magda and Nadine as they explore their sexualities and chase boys. Ellie has some love interests but they never actually like her and are always bound to reject and deride her. Even her friends often deride her, and seem to keep her around as a kind of pet. She never truly feels ‘equal’ to Magda and Nadine.

So there’s a question as to if Ellie is fat or not, and if not, why not? Why not just commit to it either way? If she is a big girl, talk about that, talk about the struggles that come with that especially as she is part of this hot girl friend group. If it’s all in her head, commit to that. Talk about the body dysmorphia. And in terms of Nadine, why isn’t she the Ana? Why is she stick-thin, self-destructive, insecure and desperate for attention, but is constantly characterized as eating junk food constantly yet somehow maintaining such a low weight?

Girls Under Pressure opens with the Girls at a shopping mall where a promotional event for a magazine called ‘Spicy’ is scouting for teen girl models, which in retrospect is a bit dodgy. There’s talk about how the girls are posing as sexy and Ellie mooning over how sexy and gorgeous and attractive Magda and Nadine are but the problem of hypersexualisation of characters who are thirteen isn’t criticised, obviously. Somebody in the crowd calls Ellie fat which is followed up by this illustration.

Wow, good one. I have no idea why they didn’t commission a different artist to do the girl series, because these childlike illustrations really clash with the subject matter.

Ellie immediately spirals into paranoia from this one comment and naturally looks at her naked body in the mirror, described quite graphically here;

I look at my round face with its big baby cheeks and double chin, I look at my balloon breasts, I look at my flabby waist, I look at my saggy soft stomach, I look at my vast wobbly bum, I look at my massive thighs, I look at my round arms and blunt elbows, I look at my dimpled knees and thick ankles, I look at my plump padded feet.

One long running sentence, and it’s quite sad. It kind of reads like Ellie is disgusted by her womanhood- there’s focus on her breasts, adjectives like ‘soft’ ‘plump’ ‘dimpled’ which would usually depict beauty. ‘Balloon breasts’ are surely something most girls would want but to Ellie the idea of being wobbly, soft, round, being a symbol of womanhood is dysphoric. It could be a gender thing or an age thing.

I suppose it was different when I was a little kid. (…) in my dungarees and stripy T-shirts and bright boots to match the ribbons. I was cuddly, that was all. I was definitely cute, with my happy hairstyle and big dark eyes and dimples.

Jacqueline captures quite well the jarring twist from childhood to adulthood, as a girl where you go from being a neutral figure to a big breasted maniac. Ellie describes her binge eating after her mother’s death which is of course an eating disorder within itself. This could be a source of many an Anorexic. Jackie cycles between a few feelings as to Ellie’s disgust towards her body; age, sexual anxiety, trauma, but settles on social status.

I was still one of the OK Girls. I wasn’t a swot, I wasn’t a slag, I wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t covered in spots, I wasn’t fat. Not really fat, like poor Alison Smith in our year, at least fifteen stone, waddling slowly up and down the corridors as if she were wading through water, her eyes little glints inside the huge padded cage of her head.

This is one of the extremely visceral descriptions. She likens fatness to insanity; a padded cell. As someone who was as fat as Alison Smith in school, I can’t say that’s inaccurate. Alison is mentioned four times in this book, but we never actually meet her. She’s just a background deathfat for Ellie to gawp at- and is the one character who Ellie doesn’t think herself lower than. The specter of Alison makes Ellie commit to ‘going on a diet’

The following chapters follow the same formula; somebody shows up with delicious food, Ellie agonises how much she wants to eat it but she can’t because she’s FAT.

I want a bacon sandwich so much. Just one won’t hurt. No. Think pig. Big big big pig. I draw an Ellie pig upstairs. I start on an entire menagerie of Outsize Ellie Animals. Ellie warty warthog. Ellie snaggle-tooth rhino. Ellie blubbery seal. Ellie humpback whale.

The completely normal habit of drawing yourself as various repulsive creatures. Ellie’s head is a really scary place to be, the first-person present tense shows this well. The ‘think pig’ (some variation of ‘think pig’ is repeated throughout) reminds me a bit of the ‘choose life’ bit in Trainspotting. And the way Ellie constantly uses her own name as a kind of slur- it’s brutal and I really do think it goes beyond teen insecurity.

Ellie is self-loathing to the point of violence;

I look at my body and see the lard beneath the skin. I start clawing at myself, as if I’m trying to rip the flesh right off me.

I punch myself hard in my own stomach. ‘You’re not getting fed today, do you hear, you great big ugly gut?’ (Note Ellie is talking to herself here)

Ellie borders on self-harm, or that that isn’t truly discussed. It’s scary how Ellie deteriorates so much in one afternoon over one comment, perhaps not unrealistic to a fourteen year old, but still quite unnerving. Especially considering Ellie is supposed to be a bit of an everywoman, relatable teenage heroine. It isn’t normal to feel the way she does, and this could change, but it isn’t really challenged. Any girl reading this book should know that it’s not just typical girl activity to hit and scratch yourself.

As I read GuP, I compared it a little in my mind to the book Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, which is about the relationship between two anorexic friends and how one handles the other’s death. A book where a girl literally dies of Anorexia is less graphic than Girls Under Pressure. For example, the word ‘fat’ is found about 47 times in Wintergirls- and ‘Fat’ is used an estimated 124 times in Girls Under Pressure. And for context, Wintergirls in 216 pages long. Girls Under Pressure is 127 pages long. So possibly the word ‘fat’ appears on almost every page in GuP.

Wintergirls generally avoids graphic descriptions of bodies either way and is more about the psychological struggle Lia faces as an anorexic- since it isn’t so much about looks in Wintergirls as it is about being in control. Ellie’s is very physical. Jackie relishes in grotesque descriptions of Ellie’s body, vivisecting each part literally from head to toe.

We also have these dreadful Sharratt illustrations of Ellie’s fat ass, and these lurid comparisons to animals and focus on Ellie’s straining belly busting her shirts and whatnot like some awful fat fetish fanfic. In some ways, I understand this choice. To sell Ellie’s self-hatred and determination to change, really shove the reader’s face in how hideous she looks to herself. I’m not sure it’s the best move for a problem of the week book for 12-17 year olds (age range per Waterstones)

What’s it going to say to a girl who does look like this? If Ellie- or looking like Ellie- is that revolting, why not lose weight? And it isn’t unique to this book. Throughout the entire Girls series, Ellie despairs over her ugliness. Her horrible self-esteem is kind of a personality quirk. Even after this reckoning, it doesn’t really change. Again, most of the books she’s ridiculed and excluded for being ugly and/or fat.

Ellie binge/purges in this book, which is insanely graphic.

I heave and heave but I can’t do it. I shove a finger in my mouth. It’s horrible, oh, my stomach, two fingers, I’ve got to, I’ve got to . . . oh . . . oooooh . . . I am so sick. So horribly revoltingly disgustingly sick, slowly – again and again and again. I have to hang on to the edge of the toilet to stop myself falling. Tears stream down my face, sweat runs down my back

There’s something almost sexual about this description. The spelled-out moans of oh, ooooh, the description of the tears and the sweat and the fingers and the loss of control. I think Girls Under Pressure uses food/starving/puking in a pretty sexual way. Everything in Jacqueline Wilson books is kind of about sex, especially the older reader books. GuP is also the only Girls book where Ellie doesn’t have a love interest, and her bullimia becomes a love interest in its own way. Food itself is too, which always has a pretty erotic depiction with mouths watering and cheese bubbling and aromas aroma-ing.

I run my finger round the box. I get a carton of milk from the fridge and wash it all down so quickly that milk dribbles down my nightie but I’m still not satisfied. I feel hungrier than ever.

This really speaks for itself, the fondling of the food, the dribbling of milk down Ellie’s nightie, the whole ‘still not satisfied’ thing. Eating becomes penetration. The entire binge scene is pretty long. There’s a lot of lewd language. A lot of cramming and shoving. A lot of drooling. A lot of food being smeared on Ellie’s half naked body and moaning on emphasis on how she wants ‘more, more, more’ It’s weird.

And further on the whole sex aspect, I think there’s undeniably a gender dysphoria to this. Ellie despairs with envy that her fat father is a man and gets attention from women. And at the art gallery. Usually this will be the scene where a character sees that BIG WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL TOO but Ellie is utterly disgusted by the paintings of bigger women. And she cries at the thought of having breasts ‘of any shape and size’. Yeah, Ellie, there might be a larger issue at hand.

Ellie commits to eating less and less, and to put herself off eating sausage she compares them to penises. The psychosexual thoughts there don’t even need to be unpacked.

Meanwhile, Nadine is preparing to become a teen model for Spicy. Magda is trying to impress some boy which of course leads to disaster towards the end. Ellie and Magda start going to the gym where Ellie meets a true Anorexic by the name of Zoe.

Zoe is a great character and never appears after this book. She’s a teen genius who also loves art and actually gets on quite well with Ellie. Zoe would be a way better friend to Ellie than Magda and Nadine. I’ve said this before; despite being a hardcore Ana, Zoe was the only character who didn’t judge Ellie for her weight. But Ellie judges Zoe for hers, after seeing Zoe’s thin anorexic frame in the gym changing rooms, Ellie is disgusted.

She’s thin and sad. Thin and mad. She’s starving herself. She looks like a living skeleton. There’s nothing desirable about her gaunt body, her jutting bones, her beaky features. I don’t want to end up like Zoë

So at least we can’t say that GuP glorifies skinniness, it just hates all body types. Basically every single female character we meet is given some sort of demeaning description. Sexy, little, gangly, curvy, big bum, stick-thin, pear-shaped, etc, etc. In Ellie’s head nobody actually has a perfect body. Weight loss is just a rat race to respectability. After all, Ellie never talks about being pretty or beautiful, just becoming more acceptable.

I draw myself the way I could be if I only stuck to a proper diet. Still small. Still frizzy-haired. Still bespectacled. But thin.

Ellie accepts she’ll still not like herself if she was thin, that she’ll still be unattractive. But somehow she’ll have a mark of respectability and will no longer feel socially low or like a target. For Ellie, being fat shows you as inept, unable to keep a proper body, and in the same turn being anorexic does too.

But Ellie obsesses over Zoe, sometimes thinking of her as repulsive and sometimes thinking of her as the benchmark of weight success. Ellie spends the rest of her time eating, not eating, thinking about eating, being insecure, assuming everyone’s looking at her and thinking she’s a fatass, and having banal conversations with her friends.

Nadine gets rejected by Spicy but meets a dodgy photographer, Ellie gives her the whole ‘this guy could be a creep’ speech. The twist is he isn’t. Nobody cares. Magda has a slightly more interesting storyline. She goes out with the guy she liked, he tries to rape her and then she blames herself for being sexual and cuts off her hair like Jodie Foster in The Accused. The storyline is a little heavy to be so in the background but whatever, I could talk about how the sexual assault thing was handled but it’s a whole new can of worms.

I think a better way of doing this book would be to show that Nadine and/or Magda was also struggling with disordered eating. I mean, surely it would be an interesting thing for Ellie to find out that her friends- who she thinks of as the very image of perfection she can’t achieve- also suffered with an eating disorder and weren’t ‘naturally thin’ But instead it’s portrayed that Nadine and Magda have Absolutely No Issues With Eating Whatsoever and Ellie is just a freak. This is yet another thing they win.

The general consensus in the book is that Ellie needs to Get A Grip. There isn’t really a further discussion about eating disorders, basically every characters tells Ellie she’s being an asshole and to move on.

‘You haven’t got any problems, you nutcase,’ says Magda, snapping back to life.

‘That’s right, you’re just being completely and utterly loopy,’ says Nadine. ‘You’ll end up like Zoë if you’re not careful.’

This is from the big scene where Magda and Nadine confront Ellie about her eating disorder. And this is what it comes down to “Calm down, you’re annoying us, just be a normal person and eat your damn cranberry muffin’. It kind of works;

Maybe I’m going to stop dieting now. Maybe it’s mad to fuss about the way I look. It’s all so stupid anyway.

Again, it’s all about status. Ellie will starve herself if it makes her finally feel respectable, she’ll eat again if people think starving herself is weird. Her submission to Magda and Nadine overrides anything else most of the time.

Later, Ellie finds out her ex is dating a fat girl which momentarily makes her feel better. Again, her self-worth is completely dependent on others. If she sees someone better than her, she spirals. If she sees someone worse than her, she is comforted. Nothing is actually about Ellie.

But Ellie has a relapse over the Christmas break when faced with the golden crispy Turkey and her family realises she’s been spewing and undo her progress with their sniping. I’m not sure how much time has passed throughout this book, but Ellie apparently has experienced all the major symptoms of a long-term eating disorder in like a month, in a paragraph that reads like Jackie just found a book about anorexia symptoms and copied them out;

I’m still starving hungry all the time and my tummy aches badly and I keep having to pee a lot and whenever I get up quickly or rush round I feel faint and most of the time I’ve got a headache and I feel a bit sick and I’ve got a filthy taste in my mouth and my hair’s gone all floppy and I’ve got spots all over my face and on my back too

After all the constant yo-yoing of ‘I’m not going to starve myself anymore’ and ‘I will starve myself’ - entirely dependent on someone else’s opinion or seeing somebody skinny. Ellie makes up her mind to stop the anorexia after seeing Zoe in a mental hospital with some other anorexics, who are described as ‘zombies’ and as a kind of spectacle of grotesquery.

I see them clearly. I see their thin lank hair, their pale spotty skin, their sunken cheeks, their sad stick limbs, the skeletal inward curve of their hips, the ugly spikiness of their elbows, their hunched posture. I see the full haunted horror of their illness.

Get it? Anorexic girls are ugly! Why would anyone want to have an eating disorder?

I don’t want to end up one of those sad sick girls in Zoë’s ward. I’m going to eat what I want, when I want. I can do it. I can.

And then Ellie is free from the disordered eating all because anorexics are undesirable. This probably isn’t even accurate. I doubt Jacqueline did much research into the Anorexic community, because every wannarexic started out looking at bonespo. Of course Ellie’s reasoning is a little different- IE her disordered eating doesn’t come from a sexual trauma or a desire for control but from self-hatred where it isn’t really about looking any kind of way but just not being Ellie anymore.

It’s not totally unrealistic that Ellie would drop this disordered eating the way she did, but Ellie I think would always find a way to self harm. Her total utter disdain to herself, even punching herself isn’t going to be without consequences. I feel Ellie would go more towards cutting than disordered eating but cutting has never been addressed in the Wilson canon. I really don’t like how this book doesn’t acknowledge that even if Ellie isn’t anorexic anymore, she clearly has a mental illness. Punching yourself in the stomach isn’t normal, fantasising about chopping yourself up isn’t normal, angrily drawing yourself as ugly animals all day isn’t normal. At one point Ellie is threatened with seeing a psychologist which seemingly goes out the window when she stops spewing, but she really could have done with it.

The narrative plays it as though Ellie’s self harm is her own idiot choice and that generally, anorexia is a choice and you need to get a grip because if you get too thin, it’s gross anyway. The book doesn’t really escape the social prejudice of anorexia being a vapid irrational woman disease. Mostly Zoe and Ellie’s diets are referred to by other characters or Ellie herself as ‘silly’ ‘mad’ ‘crazy’ or ‘stupid’ The characterisation of the anorexic girls in the ward dancing to pop videos and lounging in front of the TV and reading magazines plays at the idea that they are silly airheads.

‘I can’t understand what makes girls starve themselves like that.’

‘I don’t think girls themselves understand either,’ I say softly.

Every Ana I ever met knew exactly why he or she was doing it. It’s a broad simplification and essentially boils down to ‘damn, teenage girls are so unknowable and wild’ Please, Jackie, have a conversation with someone.

There’s an undercurrent that only losers care about their looks- and that to try to diet or have an eating disorder makes you a fucking neurotic bitch and you should be more like Nadine and Magda who eat whatever they want and stay thin and confident. I think a lot of Jackie books have a philosophy of accepting your lot- characters are naturally skinny or naturally chubby, naturally confident or naturally neurotic, born lucky or born unlucky, and learn to adapt to that. Very few Jackie protagonists ever get out of their own head or ever try to improve themselves.

The final line of this book is “And with one bound the new powerful artistic talented me soars out of the classroom and down the corridor to join Magda and Nadine for lunch.” and it feels so insincere. It doesn’t really explain why she had this change of heart and suddenly likes herself. Sure there’s her precious art teacher Mr Windsor who tells Ellie she can draw and stuff, and shows off pictures of fat women and says they can be beautiful too. Which is somehow meant to have worked even though Ellie thought similar paintings hideous at her earlier trip to the art gallery? It’s just because the Girls books always return to the status quo at the end like in a sitcom episode. She’ll hate herself again in the next book.

I really recommend you guys read Wintergirls instead. It’s incredible.

I first received Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi as a birthday present when I was 14. Somebody I knew laughed at the title, saying “shatter me” sounded dirty.

Shatter Me is in fact a bit dirty. I couldn’t finish at 14 for that reason. I was the world’s most asexual teenager and certainly wasn’t interested in boys so Juliette’s constant lusting over Adam Kent was disgusting to me. Practically every line is about how much Juliette wants Adam to ‘run his hands over every inch of her’ or words to that effect. I wanted violence and killing and horrors, damn it! So I gave up on it. Even so, it stuck with me after all these years and on rereading it I was struck by how unique it actually was compared to other YA books.

Shatter Me has a cult following but a deeply negative reception on Goodreads. Most of the negative goodreads reviews about Shatter Me lay into Juliette’s supposed weakness, her ‘whining’;

Juliette does nothing but sulk around, wait for death, and whine

Oh, Juliette, SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY. Insufferable whiny bitch.

My opinion is that we should encourage teenage girls to be more whiny. I’d advise every teenage girl to whine and not feel the need to bottle up her feelings and suck up unhappy situations so nobody calls her ‘whiny’ or a ‘bitch’

Shatter Me has a fantastic set up. Juliette is a super-powered teen who has lived most of her adolescence in an insane asylum as the world outside crumbles into an apocalypse. The character is already totally out of the loop as to what if going on in the world because of her status. So we don’t have to suffer through the exposition machine like we do in most YA Dystopia. This time we get information about the world’s system slowly and in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural.

I think Shatter Me is the first YA dystopia I’ve read where the character is mentally ill. This is a bit debatable, since Juliette isn’t in an asylum for mental illness reasons but because she accidentally killed a little boy while not in control of her powers. I don’t think the little boy is brought up enough. You’d think this would haunt Juliette’s every moment, and she does feel shitty about it but it’s not really much of a bother to her.

Juliette probably does have PTSD at least. She’s often referred to as insane or crazy, but is mostly quite rational. Her only issue is that she gets sad when she thinks about her hard luck. The infamous writing style of Shatter Me full of strikethroughs and weird metaphors is meant to reflect a broken mind, but I wouldn’t say Mafi does it all that well. Juliette’s inner voice isn’t all that different to Katniss Everdeen’s, it’s just slightly more poetic.

I truly wish this book had spent more time in the asylum and diving into Juliette’s isolation and how that affected her. Literally the very opening scene breaks her isolation with the arrival of Adam Kent. The asylum is kind of a non-sequitur, because she leaves it fairly soon after Adam turns up and doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of problems adjusting to the world outside. Somehow once she’s out of the asylum, she’s able to be assertive and confident with everybody she meets which I found a bit of a cop-out. Perhaps this was pressure from the editors, since it’s a YA dystopia we NEED a strong female character. We can’t have her actually struggle and not be strong all the time, that’s like… sexist.

Juliette’s problem is that when people touch her skin, they go into immense pain and die. This is an interesting power for a teenage girl to have. She is basically immune to sexual violence but she also can’t have intimacy. This aspect isn’t really discussed at much length and the entire can’t-be-touched thing is not given much analysis which is strange. There isn’t really an aspect of Juliette contemplating how she won’t be able to have children or have sex but also will never be raped. She more looks at her power as “Oh no I could kill someone and nobody trusts me”

Juliette could have been given any other superpower at this rate and it wouldn’t make much difference.

Tahereh Mafi, the author of this book, is a Muslim who grew up in America, and 9/11 happened while she was in High School. Mafi talks in her interview with the First Draft podcast about facing a lot of racism, isolation and bullying growing up and having to move around a lot because of it. She says that some of Shatter Me is semi-autobiographical.

This influence is shown in Juliette’s early childhood in Shatter Me;

She is a walking weapon in society, is what the teachers said. […] She should be removed from your home, is what the police officers said. (Chapter 7)

My parents were always moving, always running away from the messes I made, from the playdates I’d ruined, from the friendships I never had. (Chapter 22)

Juliette’s early childhood was marked by hiding, constant prejudice and alienation because of her reputation as a potential Terrorist. The metaphor here is clear as day.

It isn’t clear if Juliette is supposed to be from a Muslim background too. It is a white girl on every book cover and she has a white name but I think there are some Islamic imagery in her character at least.

Firstly, she has to cover head to toe because of her ‘power’. She has some concerns over her dignity and is afraid to wear skimpy clothes. There are vague references to religion in Juliette’s past.

Their child was a monster. Possessed by the devil. Cursed by darkness. Unholy. An abomination. (Chapter 7)

Then there’s Juliette’s reaction to Adam suddenly appearing in her cell.

They locked me up with a boy. A boy. Dear God. They’re trying to kill me. They’ve done it on purpose. To torture me, to torment me, to keep me from sleeping through the night ever again. (Chapter 1)

Obviously with Juliette’s power it’s not as though the boy could assault her which is what most woman would be scared of. So it’s clearly on a deeper level why Juliette does not want to share her space with a male. It’s kind of a modesty thing.

Stop looking at me, is what I want to say. Stop touching me with your eyes (Chapter 2)

Yep. Anyway, the book quickly becomes the Adam show as Juliette feels more warmly towards him. It turns out that Adam is a soldier who was hired to get close to Juliette to scope out if she’s mentally stable enough to be used as a weapon of war and eventually Juliette is dragged out to go to the barracks. We become aware that this world is basically under military rule now and we get this bit of world-building

the world has been divided into 3,333 sectors and each space is now controlled by a different Person of Power

Because that makes sense. Warner is the Person of Power in this particular sector. Warner is a devilishly handsome 19-year-old dictator. I really found his age unbelievable, not in terms that he is a commander but in how he acts. He talks like a fifty year old man, he’s far too wise and strategic to be believed as such a kid. I imagine he probably was written as older initially but he was aged down to be close in age to Juliette and make the sexual tension between them less uncomfortable.

I wish they had done more with him being so young. They could have made this a comment about child soldiers and the absurdity of such a young lad commanding an army and being in charge of an entire ‘sector’ (how big is a sector exactly?) It’s also implied that Warner isn’t just one Person of Power he seems to be THE Person of Power.

He tells me about the books they’ve destroyed. The artifacts they’re preparing to burn. The ideas he has for a new world and how I’ll be a great help to him (Chapter 21)

The idea of a post-apocalyptic world taken over by a fascist boy-emperor is so cool but I feel like it’s not used to his full potential. I feel Warner should have been more of a Caligula but he’s just non-racist Hitler and overall a pretty boring guy. I also feel like not giving him a foil, like an adviser or servant, was a mistake. Since we see him just knocking around by himself whenever he’s in the barracks, there’s nothing to contrast him against or to show another side to him. He’s dull.

Juliette becomes Warner’s creature as he gives her her own fancy room with a wardrobe full of dresses and gives her fancy food. Queue the obligatory “all this opulence while the Poor People are struggling!” moment.

Juliette gets her obligatory “Strong Female Character” moments as she REFUSES to take the food she’s being offered or wear a pretty dress or indeed become a weapon. It becomes more apparent Warner wants to fuck her in the corniest supervillain way possible. He literally says things like “I think you look rather lovely with all your body parts intact, don’t you?”

It’s a truly uncomfortable dynamic between Warner and Juliette and not in a fun way. There’s a scene where Warner forces Juliette to essentially torture an infant. I couldn’t believe that a romance between Warner and Juliette is even entertained after this but it is. We constantly hear about how Juliette is fighting her attraction to Warner. He’s so gorgeous- no- no, he’s evil!!

Shatter Me has the rare distinction of (possibly?) being a YA dystopia that is commenting on an actual societal issue rather than the usual “You guys what if the government was like totally lame” slop seen in the likes of Matched or Divergent. It’s very much about Juliette being an almost racialised other who’s seen as a walking bomb, and the trigger-happy military solving all their problems with torture and violence.

The stand-in for the US government here is a military group called ‘The Reestablishment’ who have taken power after a bunch of bad things happened. Apparently food shortages due to climate issues which apparently caused everyone to spin out of control.

Under the new regime, more people have died at the end of a loaded gun than from an empty stomach (Chapter 5)

It’s kind of interesting that America isn’t specifically mentioned in this book, nor is the country Shatter Me takes place in is given any kind of name. We just know the “world” has been dividing into sectors.

The Reestablishment wants a totally post-racial world.

They want to destroy anything that could’ve been the reason for our problems. They think we need a new, universal language.

They’re incinerating culture, the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience. (Chapter 6)

It isn’t clear if this there erasure of diversity is in a white supremacy way or in a ‘colourblindness’ way. Warner is repeatedly described as being blond with green eyes and I could definitely see him being racist even though he isn’t stated as such.

Juliette finally escapes Warner’s torture camp with Adam. She goes to Adam’s home where he’s dutifully raising his cutesy kid brother James. Juliette is somehow magnificent with James despite having the trauma of accidentally killing a little boy and being involved in the torture of that poor kid at the barracks. You’d think Juliette would freak out seeing a little kid again but she doesn’t and doesn’t even comment on it, which really annoyed me.

The world outside seems pretty decent. All we know is that orphaned children are being cared for and given free food packages. It appears everyone gets food packages and not just kids but ‘some people get more food than others’

It’s remarkable that people are getting free food at all!

Over at Casa Adam, Juliette spends her day making out with Adam and chilling. Oh yes, as it turns out Adam so happens to be immune to Juliette’s power. I hated this twist, because a romance where one person can’t touch the other without killing them would be a great tragedy (watch the show Pushing Daisies!). It’s so awfully convenient that the guy she likes is immune to it so she doesn’t have to even worry for a moment about her curse making intimacy hard. This review from The Islamic School Librarian said it best:

For a book about a character who can’t touch, I feel like the majority of the book is about her touching and being touched.

Exactly right. We wasted PAGES just reading about Adam and Juliette making out and heavy petting (but never going all the way of course)

The entire point of this book is that Juliette can’t be touched which should lead to all kinds of angst. But THREE different characters turn out to be immune to her touch! There’s not even a 'learning to control it’ aspect. It’s just pure good luck that they are.

Or maybe bad luck. Warner happens to be immune to her power too. Juliette is eventually snatched away from Adam’s love nest and recaptured by Warner (she really does get thrown from pillar to post!) and Warner is as rapey as you’d expect at realising he’s immune to her death touch.

[Warner] is like a feral dog, crazed and wild, thirsty for chaos, simultaneously aching for recognition and acceptance. Love. “We can really be together,”

Love? Juliette, he’s acting like he’s going to rape you! He does in fact forcefully kiss and touch her in this scene which is horrible:

I feel like I’m watching it happen, detached from my own body, incapable of intervening. More than anything else, I’m shocked by [Warner’s] gentle hands, his earnest eyes.

“You’re going to come back with me whether you like it or not. But you can choose to want it. You can choose to enjoy it—”

Juliette is literally dissociating while he forces himself on her but at least he’s gentle and earnest or whatever.

What he says to her is vile and it reads very sexually abusive. You can choose to want it? Not even ‘you will want it’, he’s just telling her to delude herself into accepting the rape. Juliette decides to act like she will have sex with him so she can get the gun out of his pocket. But she’s also into it.

Warner grips my hips and allows his hands to conquer my body. […] There’s an electric charge between us I hadn’t anticipated. My head is spinning. His lips are on my neck, tasting me, devouring me, and I force myself to think straight.

I’m not sure I’ve properly explained just how horny this book is. It’s the horniest YA book ever, there’s no actual sex scenes but we get constant lusting from Juliette for both Warner and Adam. This scene does thankfully end with Juliette shooting Warner and not being ravaged by him. She retrieves Adam and is taken by Adam’s friend to a safe house owned by the ‘rebels’ of this book.

The rebel organisation is called Omega Point, which got a good laugh out of me. I think this book was written a little bit before the Omegaverse was a thing so Mafi can’t have known but it’s still funny. Also it’s a little strange that Omega Point is called that when this book is often touted as ripping ideas from the X-Men somewhat, and in the X-Men the most powerful mutants are called Omega-Level.

Apparently Omega Point is a safe space for people with superpowers run by a guy named Castle who’s very Professor X like. The final chapter is a bit of a fever dream and Omega Point seems a bit too capable, they’re able to make a personalised super suit for Juliette and I have to wonder where the budget came from. Personally I did not feel interested in continuing the giant Shatter Me trilogy based on this ending.

It’s probably not right for me to say this book is really much of a commentary. It’s more of a romance than it is a dystopia, but the dystopia is a lot more interesting than the romance. Both love interests are cliches and don’t feel real. Warner is a moustache-twirling rapey villain who has a whole “come to the dark side, we will be unstoppable” motive. Adam is a sickeningly sweet golden retriever with endless patience and kindness.

Apparently Warner and Juliette end up married at the end of the series. From discussions I’ve seen of this online, people theorise that Mafi did originally intend Warner to be a more traditional villain but made him Juliette’s endgame due to the fandom’s love of him.

I don’t think the fandom would love him so much if he wasn’t pitted against Adam. I really think girls don’t like reading about love interests who are totally stable, especially if we position our heroine as a bit mad. It mirrors that traditional ideal patriarchal dynamic of stoic rational man and hysterical emotional woman. In the case of Juliette and Warner, both are somewhat hysterical so despite his villainy their relationship is a bit more fun.

I won’t even get into the political implications of an oppressed female prisoner falling for this world’s equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I guess this book falls more into the junior dark romance category rather than any kind of biting political commentary anyway, so I’ll just pretend it ended after book one.

I’ve never really been able to make my mind up about Love Lessons. This book was very precious to me when I was younger and I still stand by the fact that Prue is the Jacqueline Wilson protagonist I relate to the most, also being an artsy pretentious kid from a mad family who went through Hell in secondary school.

Of course this book is about a teacher-student romance, something I’ve never experienced. This was what Jacqueline had to say about her inspiration for the book;

“There had recently been a court case about some silly teacher getting involved with a young teenager. I said it’s such a worrying subject that I really don’t see how one could write about it"

Based on the timeline, I think Jackie is most likely referring to the case of Justine Rowe, a female teacher who was jailed for sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl in 2004. And there are parallels to this case in the book.

A lot of the plot beats in the book I think are taken from the real life Rowe case.

Article about it; read to see for yourself if you think it’s similar to Love Lessons

Love Lessons is about a character named Prudence King who has grown up home-schooled. Her father is a very odd character. He wants to keep his daughters isolated from the outside world, but we don’t really get why. Jackie seems to position him as a religious zealot but retcons it for some reason.

“When we were little Dad used to read aloud to us every day from a large and unwieldy Victorian Bible. Dad had been very religious until he had a row with our vicar […] and had no time for the vicar, his church, or the entire Christian faith after that.

To me, its unbelievable that a devout Christian would abandon his entire faith because he had a disagreement with one vicar. It just reads as Jackie not having the skill to really write a strict Christian upbringing and diving into religious guilt (since she’s been an atheist from birth)

Removing the religious element makes his actions totally senseless. Prue’s dad is just vaguely bigoted, obsessed with moral degeneracy for the heck of it, and appears to larp as a Victorian. Religion would have made so much more sense, but I guess that would be too much to ask for and he’s just mean and repressive for no reason.

Prue’s dad’s name is Bernard. He’s a complete dick. He has terrible tempers and terrorises the house.

Prue is his favourite child. He thinks of her as especially smart and rational compared to his other daughter and wife. He talks about how Prue is going to inheret his business too, so it’s as though he sees her as a son rather than a daughter. Despite being so trad, he makes absolutely no references to Prue ever marrying a man and is only convinced she’ll take over her dad’s business. Instance one of Prue being masculinised- that will come back.

Beranrd is so emotionally abusive to his younger daughter Grace; who is F-A-T in a big way, and according to Bernard, dumb as a brick, but Grace is so ‘dumb’ that it barely gets to her and she laughs it off. Grace and Prue’s mother is an obese tradwife who sews her daughters’ own clothes, making them look like freaks.

Prue is apparently curious about sex. I thought this was a little refreshing compared to Jackie’s usual cliche of “I’m too smart and plain for boys and GROSS WICKED SEX” she writes into her leads. Prue sneaks peaks at Victorian Erotica of all things, and reads sex tips in women’s magazines that she buys with stolen money. She even has a dreamboat imaginary medieval boyfriend called Tobias who she thinks about kissing and touching.

The plot is set into action when Prue buys a set of sexy underwear with money she stole from her dad. This pair of underwear practically becomes a character in the entire book. Prue keeps the underwear such a deadly secret from her family. But as it turns out, it literally almost was a deadly secret.

Bernard sees Prue’s sinful undies after she thrusts them in his face during an argument and he has a stroke! Never talk to me about Jackie’s realism ever again. A strict father having a stroke after seeing his daughter’s lacy knickers is an On The Buses gag, not a story beat in a gritty book meant to educate teenagers on an important issue.

Not to say it couldn’t technically happen, but it’s just so bawdy and unsubtle.

Bernard is sent to the stroke unit and is left permanently disabled. The mum struggles to keep up the girls by herself because she’s so traditional and was used to her husband telling her what to do. I really liked that her mum was mostly kind and understanding. It would have been really easy to just make a Conservative Christian (?) woman a complete bitch, so her being a decent mum was a nice subversion.

Prue and Grace are forced to go to school for the first time. Prue meets art teacher Mr Raxberry. Similarly to Jed Breaksmith, he has a made-up surname with sexually violent connotations. The berry spelling is really unusual. Some etymology on Raxberry- rax means to stretch. Berry is a fruit. Fruits could be used as metaphor for a vagina. His name is basically Mr Stretchvagina.

Back to the elephant in the room though; Justine Rowe.

It’s so notable that the case this was based upon was same-sex grooming. Queer kids are so easily preyed upon, and especially a kid like Prue from an insane Christian-ish family. I wonder if this book was originally meant to be gay. Either Rax was originally planned as a female teacher, or Rax would stay male and Prue would be a boy. There are SO MANY elements of Prue that read more as a gay boy than a straight girl. Either way, Love Lessons being hetero ends up feeling quite incongruous.

There does also appear to be a set up of Prue being a lesbian. She craves romance and passion but doesn’t like boys. Her imaginary boyfriend Tobias is an almost sexless being and wears ‘scarlet stockings’ for God’s sake. Take this quote about him;

I imagined him kissing me, touching me […] then I imagined real boys, with their foul mouths and grabbing hands, and I shuddered.

There’s a whole subplot about a boy in named Toby getting a crush on Prue and her being completely disgusted repelled by him even though he’s supposed to be the best-looking boy in class (Sidenote; Prue is probably the only narrator in the Wilson canon who is portrayed as attractive!) Honestly though, this is probably just because he’s a Boy Her Age- which in the Wilsonverse is the most repulsive creature to any teen girl.

And back to the underwear incident. The underwear could be seen as a metaphor for queerness itself. Prue’s father shames and almost disowns her when he finds it. The kids at school bully her when they see she wears them. She keeps the underwear hidden away in her room and strokes them at night.

And the scene of her father seeing the underwear almost reads like a coming-out scene;

‘You sleazy disgusting little trollop!’ Dad shouted. ‘You’re no daughter of mine.’

Also for Boy Prue this would make even more sense for the father to be so outraged and for this to be even more of a shameful secret. Imagine a boy from a strict Christian (?) family secretly dressing up in woman’s knickers. There’s a kind of trans element to it. Prue isn’t allowed a female identity, she’s expected to dress in a way she doesn’t connect to with her mum’s weird handmade clothes. But she feels herself when she wears the underwear;

I loved the way [the underwear] looked, the way they make me look. :

Rax is also sort of queer coded at the beginning. Grace speculates that he’s gay. Lots of emphasis is given to the fact he wears one earring, and there’s a folk myth that men wear one earring to signify they’re gay. Mrs King also questions if someone who acts and dresses like Raxberry should be allowed to work at a school upon first meeting him, which doesn’t really make sense given that he’s just a regular straight man with a family.

Prue also says this about Rax;

Surely anyone with an earring and artistic tendencies would be considered deeply suspect?

Mr Raxberry is a straight man with a traditional nuclear family where he’s the breadwinner, it doesn’t matter how much he loves art and earrings, he’s not going to be seen as ‘suspect’. This line’s inclusion would probably have made way more sense if this was a same-sex story.

Rax is in fact married to a woman called Marianne who he’s been seeing since he was fourteen, has children by and is unhappy with the aggressively heterosexual family life. Prue gets to know Marianne after being invited to babysit at the Raxberry house. Babysitting being something Rax suggested after they become close at school, no doubt as a chance to be alone with Prue.

[Marianne] would chat to me as she was getting ready, discussing diets and hairstyles and clothes. I switched off while she rattled on, but, whenever she mentioned Rax she had my full attention. She always seemed to put him down, sighing about him as if he was an exceptionally stupid child.

Prue diminishes Marianne as a typical woman, someone she has no connection to. Diets and hair and clothes? How dare she. Prue is far too good for all that with her victorian erotica. Her attitude towards Marianne is incredibly hostile. She hates everything about Rax’s marriage, the sheer heterosexuality of it. She hates how curvy Marianne is, how good she is with makeup, how emotional she is, what an aggressive symbol of femininity she is.

Prue notices how hostile it is between them, a male and female who have nothing in common but their children. Marianne putting Rax down for being lazy, both exhausted by these awful kids.

[Rax] said all this boring ordinary stuff, the baby still balanced in his hand, but his eyes were looking at me. They were saying, ‘Hark at me, bleating all this suburban daddy stuff. What am I like?’

How the hell is that what his eyes are saying? Zesty eyes. Prue clearly finds this suburban, nuclear family Rax is in to be sacrilege. Him being a dad with a baby is sacrilege. It doesn’t appear she has any interest in babies herself, so it’s not as though this is pure jealousy. She think he doesn’t belong here because he’s too alternative. Check this comment from Prue;

Why would Mr Raxberry want a wife like that? Why didn’t he want a wife who was artistic and creative? He was so chic and stylish himself. Why not go for a complementary partner?

Prue questions why Rax is with such a stereotypical member of the opposite sex. Why doesn’t he have a partner who’s more like him?

We’ll start our new life together, Prue and Rax. We’ll find some old cottage or beach shack, we’ll live very frugally on bread and cheese — maybe chips! — and you won’t go to work and I won’t go to school. We’ll paint all day. You’ll teach me lots of things.

While that’s all incredibly naive and childlike, it shows that Prue isn’t at all chasing a traditional method. Of note, she doesn’t want Rax to make money or provide for her, she wants an equal relationship where they share the same duties and hobbies.

Love Lessons does do some interesting things with gender, Prue positions herself as so unlike Marianne or any other girl in the narrative. She only ever gets along with males and is a clear man of the house at home with her mother and sister (eg she is the one who is expected to provide and take care of them both when dad drops)

She think she’s so much more smarter and rational, so much more in tune with what Rax is thinking, so much more in common with men.

Prue says this to Rax in the climax of the story;

‘The same age as Marianne when you started going out together. What if Marianne and I were both girls in your class at school? Would you like her best — or me?’

From a heterosexual perspective, this comment is just pure intrasexual competition. Prue is pointing out how much she mogs fat mid Marianne. But imagine if this book was queer, and the main character asks Gay Rax if they’d have chosen the traditional path of heterosexuality or not looking back. The line would have made so much more impact than just “Hey I’m a young girl and I’m hotter than your postpartum wife”

The heterosexuality of this book makes it a redpill melodrama. I think Jackie clearly wants you to like Rax. He turns down Prue’s advances despite being so tempted because he’d lose his job. How noble. This is a story of a man, whose wife just had a baby, taking pleasure in a 14-year-old girl fancying him as though it makes him a man again.

It’s worth noting in Love Lessons there are no sexual acts between Prue and Rax (other than a kiss) but there probably would have been if it wasn’t for what happened later. Rax was clearly interested. Infamously, he says he has “lain awake at night thinking about [Prue] fantasizing all sorts of things.” which can’t be anything but sexual.

Sex isn’t really a thing in Love Lessons. Sure, we have Prue’s early interest in Victorian Erotica at the start and her thoughts of kissing and touching Tobias. But with Rax, she is more hung up on him being in love with her. She thinks they’re soulmates. But there’s no real thought from Prue that Rax might want sex from her or what she’d think of that (despite her previous assertion that males have ‘grabbing hands’ and are lustful). The only allusion we get to Prue possibly thinking about Rax sexually is this;

I went to their double bed and buried my face in his pillow. I imagined him there beside me, his arms round me...

But for all we know, she could genuinely just thinking about cuddling.

Whatever was developing between Prue and Rax is cut short by a mentally disabled teenager known as Smiley Sarah.

Prue is told by her father (once he gets back from the stroke unit) that she can’t attend Wentworth High anymore. She goes to speak to Rax, whose first reaction is “You didn’t tell him, did you, Prue?” which really says it all. Once he understands the father doesn’t know about their relationship, he is relieved and says he’ll find a way for Prue to stay at school.

He totally would have been sexual with her if she’d stayed.

Smiley Sarah walks in just as Prue is telling Rax she loves him and then blurts it out in English class. The headteacher Miss Wilmott comes in to investigate the molestation,.

The climax of the book is really bizarre. Wilmott basically tells Prue she always hated her. She brings up Prue’s underwear, oddly enough, as a sign of her bad character. She says that Prue has to leave school because keeping her with Rax would be too much of a ‘risk’ although she apparently believes nothing sexual has happened between them.

Prue sees Rax afterwards and he takes her in his car right outside the school- which is insane considering he spent the whole morning explaining to his boss that he didn’t molest her. He tells her that he loves her and says this;

‘I can’t, Prue. You know I can’t. I’m going to stay with my family, stick with my job, do all the safe sensible things. But every night when I close my eyes I’ll think of us together in this car and how badly I wanted to drive off with you. I’ll imagine us walking hand in hand at the water’s edge—

Is he talking about a suicide pact?!

The general consensus by the end is that Rax loved Prue but couldn’t be with her. There isn’t a moment from Prue where she thinks that Rax isn’t all he cracked up to be or that there was nothing substantial between them, and her devotion to him runs so deep even at the end. The last two paragraphs of the book;

I just wanted to see Rax, to talk to him, to throw my arms around his neck, to kiss him, to tell him just how much I loved him, and that I would go on loving him for ever and ever.

I stayed right away from Wentworth — but several times I couldn’t stop myself getting the bus and walking along Laurel Grove. I paused outside number 34, but then I walked on. I walked and walked and walked, slowly, dreamily, as if I was strolling along the seashore .. .

Reader, Rax and Prue interacted maybe five times. I never felt this strong connection between them. To make Rax’s actions to Prue seem special, Jackie makes it that every single other teacher and every student at the school save for Toby hates Prue’s guts. Rax doesn’t say or do anything that fantastic to her, he just shows her basic kindness and Prue becomes convinced he’s the love of her life. If Prue’s school life wasn’t so completely hostile, would she have ‘loved’ Rax at all?

I missed Rax so so much. I couldn’t bear to be without him. Sometimes it was so overwhelming that I had to shut myself away and cry and cry. I thought about him first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I dreamed about him. I painted him over and over again. I wrote very long letters to him, though I tore each one into tiny shreds.

This is not normal. The Gothic ending of Prue languishing over Rax forever is clearly meant for melodrama, but does it make any sense? Especially giving that by the end Prue’s personal situation has improved massively. Miss Wilmott somehow ‘pulled strings’ for Prue to get into the fancy grammar school because she’s so smart, despite her consistently failing at school work and being in the bottom rung at school. Did Jackie just forget her characterisation? We don’t actually hear if Prue had a better time at Grammar school. Grammar School is basically just a throwaway line in the middle of paragraphs of Rax-glazing.

Also, the Victorian Erotica owned by Prue’s family turns out to be worth a lot of money, they sell it and suddenly the family’s finances are completely improved literally overnight. Don’t talk to me about Jackie’s realism ever again. But even so, giving that all of Prue’s problems were solved in a week, you’d think she’d be able to look at Rax with a fresh set of eyes and figure that their flirtation was totally meaningless.

But the book ends with the note of Unrequited Love. Prue eternally pining over Rax and his midlife crisis. But of course, this book isn’t really intended to be a realistic or educational portrayal of this subject. It’s intended to titillate. This is what Jacqueline’s own comment on the book is.

"I did wonder, should I do this, but then I thought, well, let's go for it. This is what many girls fantasise about, after all."

Yes, this isn’t even really a book that says at the bare minimum that it wouldn’t be right to have an affair with your teacher. It’s thesis is “Girls, how hot would it be if your teacher was into you?” The only real condemnation towards Prue and Rax getting together is that he would Get Into Trouble which is presented as this great injustice.

If you needed any more proof that Jacqueline supports this, her book Opal Plumstead features a sixteen year old who falls in love with a pornographer in his forties and this is portrayed as great love story. And as I mentioned in The Diamond Girls, the oversexed 12-year-old Rochelle is given a romance with a 16-year-old gang-banger which is also portrayed as a great love story.

People often defend this as Jackie’s realism (sigh) Men have sexual relationships with young girls in real life, why shouldn’t she write that?

But in real life, if a 16-year-old hooked up with a middle-aged pornographer it would probably not turn out to be a sweet love story. Jackie’s basically had no negative portrayals of older men with young girls, except if you count Girls in Love which sometimes touches on dangerous men wanting to have their way with the 13-year-old characters. But even in Girls in Love, the main romance is between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old and the mere thought of the main character dating a boy her age is considered disgusting and unthinkable.

I suppose the Jed Breaksmith debacle in My Sister Jodie was shown as harmful, but that was largely due to Jed’s class and possible status as a gypsy. Had he been a posh educated teacher at the boarding school and not some scruffy gardener, it probably would have been written as a great romance.

Love Lessons ends as a very pointless book. Prue has come round in circles, at first controlled and repressed by her devotion to her dad. By the end controlled and repressed by her devotion to Rax. She hasn’t learned anything about herself, hasn’t done any growing up, in fact she’s devolved. At the beginning she was a headstrong, cynical kid and by the end, she’s a mush in a stationary state of puppy-like devotion to a man who she hardly knew.

Is this the Fallen Woman narrative again? Prue shunned by her supposed desirability, constantly shamed for her perceived sexuality, taken in by false promises from a man above her station and left to wonder the Earth broken forever?

At least if Love Lessons had been same-sex like the case it’s based upon, the character would have some sort of character journey as they grapple with being gay via their attraction to their teacher. As the hetero story it is, it just feels like the same old ‘stand by your man’ narrative. Stand by your older married teacher, burn with love for him forever while he stays with his wife, never ever betray his secret, don’t push HIM because HE will get into trouble with the law. Take what Miss Wilmott says.

You should have thought of that before you started acting in this ridiculous and precocious manner. […] He would not only lose his job, he could find himself in very serious trouble. Did you ever stop to think about - that?’

Of course, this is Miss Wilmott’s perspective and she is a little bit villainous, but the onus is on Prue not to act generally. She stops pursuing Rax because she thinks that using her “black magic” on him will get him in trouble, it’s her responsibility to stay away. He’s not to blame. (Note: Prue actually uses Black Magic to describe her own seductiveness, page 202)

It end up in the same misogynistic ideal- wicked naughty schoolgirl with a poor old man who’s trying so hard not to be tempted and no element of Rax being responsible, or being the initiator even though he was the one who initiated them meeting outside of school.

In conclusion, Love Lessons is a cliched piece of trash which was inspired by a case of same-sex sexual abuse. There was potential here to explore a really rare taboo with some sensitivity, but instead Jackie chickened out and wrote a terrible Lolita romance novel and most shamefully aimed it at 12-year-olds.

We all remember where we were when we read My Sister Jodie and first experienced the shock of seeing the plucky redhead hurl herself from the top of a tower and land in a heap of mangled, twisted gore in front of her entire boarding school. The question is; why? Why end a children’s book with the violent suicide of a 14-year-old?

This is a dissection of My Sister Jodie, Jodie Wells as a character and why she really took her life.

It’s a mystery how this is Jackie’s only book set in a classic boarding school given the influence she admits she takes from books like Jane Eyre and A Little Princess. I guess because she has a hang-up of writing characters in poverty, so boarding school is out of the question. This is a shame because I think Jackie is great at writing poor-little-rich-girl characters and I wish that came up more often.

The family in My Sister Jodie are working-class and end up at boarding school (Melchester College) through a series of schmaltzy events. The parents in this are properly quaint working class though, with jobs. The dad, Joe is a carpenter and the mum, Sharon works at a teashop.

Sharon, however, comes from a much more checkered background;

[Sharon’s mother], who always ‘went down the boozer’, and [Sharon’s Dad] who’d been on benefit all his life, and we especially wanted to meet [Sharon’s brother] who’d been ‘in and out of the nick’, but [Sharon] left home at seventeen and never gone back.

I don’t believe we ever do meet these characters. Funny that being on benefit is seen as equally sordid as chronic alcoholism and being in prison. Sharon explains feelings of isolation as a child, nobody wanted to be her friend because of her maniacal family. Sharon is a total bitch by the way. Even in her first scene, she ‘shakes’ Jodie for clanking her spoon at breakfast. She’s always yelling or physically punishing her daughters over something petty.

Jodie’s relationship with Sharon is awful. Sharon is a hugely unsupportive, mad mother who plays favourite. She infantilises Pearl, calling her a little girl and a baby and even once commenting on how flat Pearl’s chest is, but Pearl is clearly her favourite. She demonises Jodie, finds fault in everything she does and slaps her a lot.

Joe and Sharon find a job listing for a ‘married couple’ to go work at a boarding school as a caretaker and a cook respectively. What an oddly Victorian job listing for 2008. What are the odds that both members of a married couple are qualified for these specific jobs? Why not hire them separately?

And since the boarding school is in the middle of nowhere, the married couple will have to live there. They will be provided with a free fully-conditioned flat! Realistically, they’d just be forced to find digs in the nearby town and commute in or take some dystopian bus journey. Jodie and Pearl will also be allowed to attend classes there completely free. It’s the most generous boarding school on the planet.

The shy 11-year-old sister Pearl is excited to go to Melchester, but 14-year-old Jodie is furious. She wants to stay in wherever-they-live with her friends; Marie, Siobahan and Shanice. This possibly Irish trio are described as the toughest girls in Jodie’s school, a real dive where “half of the students are in trouble with the police’

Jodie is said to be getting up to no good with the Irish kids. They’re smoking, drinking and skipping school. However, before the family is due to move, Jodie falls out with her girls at a party;

Jodie: I danced with heaps of boys, More than Shanice and them, and they got a bit narked and went off without me. Marie said I was a slag because I let this boy snog my face off.

This establishes a running theme in the book where every man is attracted to Jodie, which will ultimately be her downfall. She loses the only friends she ever had in this book because of her desirability. Unlike other ‘beautiful sister’ characters in Jacqueline’s book, Jodie is actually uncomfortable with this.

Jodie: I don’t like the way boys just want to dance and snog and touch you up. They don’t want to be mates. […] I haven’t got a boyfriend, and I don’t want one either

I guess this is because Jodie isn’t super feminine, and in Jackie’s world, feminine=whore. Jodie is a punky girl with piercings and brightly dyed hair, not a blonde bombshell. She isn’t a Cassie or a Rochelle. She’s made out to be intelligent, vibrant, creative, interested in art more than boys. Being interested in art more than boys is always a sign of good moral character for a teen girl in a Jackie book.

I think Jodie’s characterisation of not being into boys (and therefore presumably a virgin) is to make the fallen-woman narrative that befalls Jodie later in the story more tragic. For those who don’t know what I mean by fallen-woman narrative; From Rosalind White’s essay The Role of the “Fallen Woman” in Three Victorian Novels:

The term “fallen woman” refers to an irrevocable loss of innocence, a concept originating in the biblical fall in the Garden of Eden; the characterisation of Eve as temptress inextricably links her fallen state with the loss of sexual purity

Spoiler; Jodie loses her sexual purity at the boarding school and as such loses her mind and eventually her life. The sexual aspect is something that’s usually glossed over in discussions of the book but I’m sure the fallen woman influence was deliberate giving Jackie’s love of Victorian literature and influence from it.

The family arrive at Melchester during the summer, when the only people there are the staff and a group of strange children who can’t go home to their parents for whatever reasons (This would probably be the much more interesting story over whatever the Wells sisters were doing) Jodie and Pearl end up hanging out with this group, which consists of three little kids and a nice 13-year-old boy named Harley who Pearl gets a crush on.

While Pearl is hanging about with Harley, Jodie is introduced to a character called Jed Breaksmith. The character that sexually corrupts her has the last name Breaksmith. Never talk to me about Jackie’s realism ever again, because searching through Ancestry.com; THIS ISN’T EVEN A REAL SURNAME!

Jed Breaksmith is the gardener at Melchester college. On Jed;

He was very good looking in a weird wild way. His black hair was long and tangled, several strands threaded with silver and glass beads. I thought he looked like a pirate, dark and threatening, and ducked my head.

Clearly there’s a racial component to this description. ‘Dark and threatening’ his hair studded with glass beads conjuring images of the classic ‘gypsy’ stereotype: the dark gypsy stealing an innocent young English Rose’s innocence. Later, Pearl literally does describe Jed as a gypsy; or at least says he has ‘wild gypsy eyes’ which apparently make her shiver in fear.

Immediately after meeting Jed, Jodie exhibits a change of behaviour. She goes from a boy-hating punk to a classic Wilson minx overnight.

Jodie: I intend to have my pick of all these posh guys when the term starts. And I might just click with old Jed. […] I like older guys. And they like me.

Pearl, as the trademark pure sister, desperately attempts to warn Jodie out of such a tryst. Jed’s is eighteen, but Pearl repeatedly says he’s an adult and therefore unsuitable. Even the girls’ father gets wind of the attraction and tells Jodie to stay away from him, not because of his age but because he’s a ‘wild lad’.

Unlike most Older Boyfriend characters, Jed is clearly positioned as villainous. For one, he wants to kill the native badgers at the boarding school that Pearl and Harley have bonded over protecting and threatens Harley for trying to save them. Animal cruelty is the one thing Jackie finds to make a male character irredeemable. She can defend perverts and pornographers until the cows come home, but threaten a little fuzzy creature? You’re a monster.

Even the badger-baiting doesn’t bring Jodie to her senses. Pearl becomes increasingly concerned that Jodie and Jed have a sexual relationship, and is actually truly afraid of it. Jodie plays coy and denies it, but there clearly is something going on.

Pearl’s frame of reference is different, rather than seeing it as a potential sexual encounter, she sees it as a potential rape. Oddly enough, Jodie also assumes Pearl is being raped by her friend Harley after seeing that she sneaks out with him and comes back with grass stains on her skirt (they have just been playing with badgers) Pearl has also written in her journal that she has a secret with Harley.

Jodie: You and Harley, of all unlikely people. But what the hell is he playing at? You’re only a little girl […] I’ll punch his stupid head in if he hurts you in any way.

I think Jodie’s assumption that Pearl is being hurt by Harley, when they’re rather close in age and even if they were dating probably wouldn’t be sexual, hints at her own abuse.

Pearl becomes so afraid of something happening with Jed and Jodie, it consumes her mind and really torments her.

I took to stalking [Jodie], wandering round the gardens, peering behind bushes and inside huts, bracing myself in case I discovered Jodie and Jed embracing.

Why should an eleven year old have to live in fear that her older sister is getting molested by a creepy gardener? Couldn’t she tell her parents?

I knew I should tell Mum. But then Jodie would get into huge trouble. I couldn’t do that to her.

A classically tragic tale, the unsupportive family breeds abuse, both internal and external. When term begins and the posh students arrive, everything really goes to Hell. Pearl makes lots of nice friends and flourishes, but Jodie is outcasted in her classes. Jed also appears to wash his hands of her, more interested in the other young girls coming in. Jodie largely struggles to get along with the other girls because they fancy Jed, someone she thought loved her- which shows how the abuse has isolated her.

Finally, Jodie loses interest in Jed after seeing him run over the protected badgers, and admits the faults.

Jodie: You were right about Jed, he is horrible. I knew it all along really. But he just—well, I know it sounds mad but he made me feel kind of special.

Jodie laments that nobody wants her and the only people who like her are boys especially older boys… ie men. This a staple of the Fallen Woman trope; it’s women who scorn the fallen woman while men may show her mercy at a price. A Fallen Woman serves no purpose to women, they serve to stay away from her so not to get dirty by association, and the betrayal of her own kind is what is most painful.

Pearl however is uniquely good and represents complete purity against her sister, even her name reflects this and her white-blonde hair against Jodie’s bright red. Pearl is so free of sin, most Jackie characters with a beautiful sister are envious, but Pearl’s love for Jodie is completely unconditional and without any hostile feeling. Rather than seeing her sister’s relationship with Jed as her being stupid or fast, she sees it as her being a victim and doesn’t ever waver on that.

Now, one thing to note is that it’s never outright confirmed Jodie was sexual with Jed but I think she did based on this dialogue.

Pearl: I was just scared you and Jed might have done more than kissing.

Jodie: Will you shut up about me and Jed! You’re getting boring. I don’t want to talk about him any more.

Her defensiveness and clear upset at the question but lack of outright denial says it all. Also, in the Badger-killing scene, Jed says this to Jodie

Jed: Hop back on the tractor. We’ll go and have a bit of fun somewhere, take your mind off it.

All but confirming the relationship was sexual.

What we’ve established about Jodie is that she was a girl who was already isolated from her family and had an abusive mother. She struggled to connect with women but is objectified by men, she lost her friends because of her perception as a temptress. She didn’t even really like boys, but is so desperate for validation and outcasted she turned to them. Common also in the Fallen Woman trope, from Rosalind;

A lower-class maiden is seduced by the idea of a life of “lace satin and jewels,” and is sexually corrupted by a man above her station who has no desire to marry her.

Of course, Jed was below her station but still his making her feel special is possibly a metaphor for riches and false promises. Her lack of love is her lack of wealth, it’s what turned her to corruption.

Jodie thus falls into a deep depression. She cries at night for no specified reason and talks more frequently about death. Rosalind White says;

A fallen woman’s fate: we learn that she dies in desolation,

Now onto Jodie’s death. Jodie’s death is built up to by a series of events. She gets tasked with reading bedtime stories to little kids and inadvertently scares the heck out of them with a ghost story about the school being haunted by the ghost of a woman who killed herself.

Jodie: Two of my boys wet their beds, Zeph was sick and Dan had nightmares and screamed the place down, yelling that the whispering ghost was coming to get him.

Back to Rosalind White’s essay;

Society’s ultimate persecution comes from her act of infanticide: her actions are no longer just immoral but criminal.

The fact Jodie refers to the kids as her boys ties into some imagery of her as a mother, which comes up frequently through the book. She is more motherly to Pearl than Sharon is, and is excessively nurturing to little kids until her sudden turn to cruelty when she scares them with the ghost story. We see her sexual corruption by Jed actively make her colder and less nurturing.

Society’s ultimate persecution then comes when Jodie is forced to stand in front of the entire school at assembly and apologise for scaring the kids. She is publicly shamed and humiliated for her act of cruelty to children. In turn, even Jed himself taunts Jodie for scaring little kids. Jodie then tells Pearl that she’s “going to show all of them”

And then comes her final act of disgrace. Jodie stands at the top of the tower impersonating the ghost she told the story of during a large outdoor gathering of all the students. She does fall to her death, but Pearl believes she was only meaning to scare them and fell by accident. I believe with all my heart it was a suicide but this is a huge debate among fans of the book.

Mainly I think this because of the ‘I’ll show all of them’ line. Impersonating a ghost is kooky, but it’s not going to show your bullies or your molester anything. Dramatically flinging yourself to your death, however… And when you look at just how despondent Jodie was at this point and her earlier speech on how nobody loves her. Pearl categorically denies her sister would ever commit suicide and attempts to convince the reader it was an accident:

She slipped in those shoes, she’d lost her balance, she’d fallen. It was an accident. I said it was an accident, Mum and Dad said it was an accident, Mr Wilberforce said it was an accident, but the newspapers wrote all kinds of sleazy lies about my sister. They suggested she was so miserable that she took her own life.

They couldn’t prove it though. I’m the only one who knows everything about Jodie, because she was my sister and she loved me more than anyone else in the whole world. As if she’d ever kill herself and leave me behind!

The they couldn’t prove it suggests to me that suicide was the case. There were hundreds of witnesses that day, surely if it was an accident it could officially be declared as such. It’s noted that the only people who insisted it was an accident was the Wells family and the boarding school’s headteacher; those who had a strong reason to deny it.

In Pearl and her family’s insistence that Jodie would not take her own life actually prevents an investigation and justice for Jodie. Had they pursued that, the boarding school would have been investigated, sued into the ground, and the sexual abuse from Jed Breaksmith could have been uncovered, and he’d be in prison for molesting a young girl and partly driving her to suicide. But since Pearl is so insistent that suicide is a selfish, immoral action not befitting of Jodie, that her sister’s love of her could have outrun Jodie’s sheer distress. Remember, Jodie’s words to Pearl;

“You think I am [special] simply because I’m your sister. No one else does.’

She didn’t even believe Pearl loved her by the end, because that’s what depression does. A common argument as to why Jodie can’t have killed herself is because of the public nature of it. Surely nobody would kill themselves in front of a bunch of little kids?? Let’s tie this into the Fallen Woman myth and infanticide. Jodie’s final humiliation was being painted as someone who traumatises children, an abuser. Her suicide reflects that. Everyone painted her as twisted and wicked she chose to die in a way that was twisted and wicked and traumatic for all the child witnesses.

After all, Pearl is an unreliable narrator. She never knows the whole story. She idolises her sister, sees her as an infallible figure, a beacon of pure goodness. She didn’t know anything about how Jodie felt, nor do we as the audience. From Pearl’s own mouth

I could never get [Jodie] to tell me anything if she didn’t want to.

She doesn’t know her sister as well as she thinks, is what I’m saying. It probably would have been better for the family to accept that their daughter was suffering, that she was being abused, that she likely did take her own life, but they choose to believe it was an accident to preserve her moral purity.

At the end, the book is revealed to be written by Pearl to her sister May who was born after Jodie’s death to understand what happened to her late sister. Poor May’s in for a shock.

I will end this review by saying My Sister Jodie is aimed at 9-13 year olds (per Amazon)

.A well-known politician chose [The Illustrated Mum] as her worst book ever, partly because she said the two sisters in the book had different fathers. […] How can children help it, anyway, if they’ve got different fathers?

The well-known politician here is Anne Widdecombe, who chose The Illustrated Mum as her worst book of the year in 2003. The fact it was her specifically who made this criticism is significant to what the book becomes. Anne is a very devout Catholic Conservative who is heavily anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-divorce and so on. Jackie wrote this book as a response, claiming;

I wanted to show by the end of the story that their family is warm and caring and loving in spite of their chaotic lifestyle

Reader, the family in this book was not warm or caring or loving at all.

I will give a bit of context around this book. In the early 2000s England, there was a huge demonisation of the lower class (or chavs) and specifically lower class women. There was a belief that women and girls were becoming pregnant on purpose to secure child benefits. That tied into a belief of promiscuity among girls in deprived areas; this idea they’d have sex with anyone because it got them a baby and therefore money.

In The Illustrated Mum, Marigold does claim benefits for her two daughters, but Mari isn’t really promiscuous. Her daughters come from two men she did appear to be in actual relationships with rather than sordid hook-ups or promiscuity. Although Marigold is a terrible mother, it isn’t because of her class or her sexuality.

Sue Diamond however…

I don’t think Jacqueline’s motive was entirely to show kids that having different fathers to your siblings is fine and normal. It was to offend Ann Widdecombe as much as possible. The Diamond Girls is lurid. It makes a spectacle of the central family. Jacqueline relishes in descriptions of their filthy conditions and of Sue’s promiscuity. Multiple characters call Sue a slag. She is said to drink and go down the town often. Her daughters resent her behaviour and bitterly speculate that Sue doesn’t know who her new baby’s father is. We as the audience don’t know who her new baby’s father, but it’s implied to be a promiscuous seventeen year old painter; described here;

The youngest [painter], who was dark with a cheeky grin. He went out with a different girl every night and he was already a dad, even though he was only seventeen.

This book is full of revolting depictions of sexuality, particularly of underage characters. Take how Sue’s two more feminine daughters Rochelle and Martine (against the tomboyish Dixie and Jude) are treated by the narrative. Jackie is sure to describe 16 year old Martine’s thong peeking through her jeans. Martine has not much interest in anything but hooking up with Tony, a boyfriend we never meet. Martine rarely actually spends time with her family and may as well have been cut from the story. I don’t believe there is a scene where she interacts with any of her sisters, much less shows them affection.

Rochelle’s story is even more harmful, she’s 12 and is said to have an exceptional beauty. She also ‘loves boys’ and is known to flirt with much older lads. At one point, Rochelle is called a ‘mini-hooker’ by her sister.

When Jacqueline describes the history of each daughter and corresponding father, she goes out of her way to make it comically scandalous. The first dad was Sue’s childhood sweetheart, the second a violent abuser, the third a junkie who died of an overdose, the fourth a married funeral director known as Creepy Old Terry who Sue hooked up with while he was burying the junkie. Creepy Old Terry is our narrator Dixie’s dad and has had some kind of relationship with her BUT he has been keeping her secret from his family. This could actually be the main conflict of the book because surely this would break anybody’s heart, but it’s not taken seriously.

I think this ties into a harmful stereotype that the lower-class (and I would call the Diamonds sub-class rather than working-class) are so feckless with the children they pump out that they wouldn’t even care about a thing like this. Realistically, any woman would be knocking down Creepy Old Terry’s door for child support rather than passively keeping the baby secret.

Although Sue is not stated explicitly to be on benefits, she is clearly dependent on the state. She lives in council housing and bags a bigger house because baby number five is on the way. She’s also given second-hand baby clothes by the council but complains they aren’t good enough, arrogantly describing the expensive baby clothes she’s going to buy instead. This is another lower class stereotype that no matter how much the government hands to benefit recipients, they want more.

A subtext could be read that Sue is having these children for money, as the old stereotype goes, because this is never outright denied or even addressed. The babies aren’t specified to be planned or unplanned, which I think makes all the difference in a story like this. This is the only allusion to Sue’s intentions in having so many kids by herself but is still so vague;

Jude: ‘Why did you ever have to get pregnant again?’

Sue: ‘I can’t help fate, darling. It’s all in the stars.’

Sue is said to be very interested in destiny and fortune-telling. This was probably an attempt to give her a personality since she doesn’t really have one. She quite often seems a poor imitation of Marigold, with both being spiritual and impulsive. Sue is just a lot stricter and less interesting than the woman-child Marigold who treated her kids more like sisters. Sue is a completely flat character compared to most of Jackie’s trademark vivid, troubled single mums.

Sue is absent throughout most of the book giving birth and then recovering. Get this, she doesn’t arrange for anyone to look after her four children while this is happening. Instead, a caring male mover named Bruce (a complete stranger) opts to take care of the girls. I don’t reckon Sue is that caring as a mother if she made no plans for anyone to stay with her kids while she gives birth, and then allows a man she has no relation to whatsoever to look after them without a second thought. He could have been a pervert.

Speaking of perverts, Rochelle falls into the hands of perverts. A group of lads in their late teens come to the house and try to pick Rochelle up while Sue is away and Bruce is left minding the Diamonds. Rochelle appears to like the attention.

Jude: OK, when you’ve stopped hitting on my little sister. Do you know how old she is? Twelve!

Rochelle: Shut up, Jude! I’m very nearly thirteen.

Perverted lad: And very well developed too, darling,

The boys then BEAT Jude for trying to stop this from happening. Bruce is luckily able to fight them off. But if he wasn’t there, what would have happened? The lads might have killed Jude, and raped Rochelle. It could have got really dark. And Sue probably would have been charged with neglect for allowing her four daughters to be left in an incredibly dangerous area by themselves while she gave birth.

Now what does this incident lead into? Well, Rochelle starts dating one of the boys from the gang. The gang that was about to beat and do god knows what to her own sister. His name is Ryan and he’s sixteen. About Ryan, Rochelle says;

He likes me, Dixie, he really does. He says I’m much prettier than any of the other girls on the Planet Estate. He thinks that’s why Jude made such a fool of herself. He says she must be jealous of me,

Textbook grooming with a dash of alienating her from her family. Rochelle is so vulnerable to this because she is not from a loving or caring family. She is literally being neglected, constantly being left alone with no protection. She doesn’t have a bond with Sue at all, nor her sisters.

And because this is a Jacqueline Wilson book, grooming is portrayed as a good thing. Bruce takes the girls to break up the date but Dixie remarks;

Ryan didn’t look at all like he wanted to hit [Rochelle] or hurt her. He was gazing at her as if she was a princess

He’s sixteen and she’s twelve but that’s okay because he doesn’t want to hit her. (I suppose a running theme in this book is ANYTHING is okay as long as there’s no hitting) Jude pleads with Sue and says;

This Ryan is years older than Rochelle. She doesn’t have a clue. She’ll end up a teenage mum if she’s not careful. Tell her, Mum.

And how does warm, loving, caring Sue respond?

Look, will you all please push off. You’re doing my head in, all of you. I just want to be left in peace.

I understand that Sue had just had the baby at this point and is post-partum and stressed but I don’t care. She isn’t fit to take care of these children, they’re suffering and she can’t handle it or support them (not that she’d care to). Jackie has no right to call this a loving, caring family when they’re falling apart at the seams. When she isn’t doing a thing to protect her daughters. Of course, Rochelle ends up dating Ryan and this is explicitly portrayed as the best thing for her. Jude even makes friends with the boys who beat her. I would dare to argue that this is conditioning girls to accept abusive behaviour from men whether intentionally or otherwise.

In the emotional climax of the book, a pregnant Martine returns from Tony’s bed and dresses down with Sue with an absolutely brutal and correct monologue;

Look at us, stuck in this hideous house on the worst estate in England. The girls are running wild. Jude’s getting into fights, Rochelle’s going round with hoodies, Dixie’s filthy, dirty and running about barefoot.

This is a perfect summary of the family. It was neglect through and through. Bruce then tries to comfort Sue who laments (rightfully) what a terrible mother she is, and calls herself a slag. Slag’s definition according to The Merriam-Webster dictionary, just for the record:

slag : a lewd or promiscuous woman.

But as Bruce puts it.

You’re not my definition of a slag. […] Slags don’t make good mums and you’re a lovely mum to your kids.’

What the hell? I think a lewd or promiscuous woman could absolutely make a good mum. I can’t believe this line is meant to be heartfelt. It’s so absurd. You can’t be promiscuous because you’re a good mum. Well, she is promiscuous and she’s an awful mum. Bruce has seen this firsthand.

I think Jackie realised how much she was failing to depict a single mum with kids by different dads as a good mother and had to add an abusive mother to boost up Sue. Dixie befriends a random posh kid named Mary who is being abused at home. It’s very clear Jackie only included this to make the Diamond’s dire situation look better. Mary’s mother is a religious zealot who physically punishes her. I theorise Mary’s mother being so religious is supposed to be a dig at Ann Widdecombe too.

Mary’s abuse is a spectacle. Mary’s mother (who is never named) is a stunningly gorgeous polished housewife. The family is deeply stereotypical with the perfect blonde homemaker baking with one hand and torturing her kid with the other, and the father always away on business.

This is how Mary’s punishment that Dixie witnesses is described.

Mary and her mum were still at the table. Mary’s mum was pinching Mary’s nose so that her mouth fell open. She rammed the crusts right down her throat, so hard that Mary’s head jerked backwards.

The use of this excessively violent language to describe this scene (rammed, jerked, right down, so hard) the needlessly graphic description to me shows that this depiction is there purely for shock value. Not enough time or sensitivity is given to Mary’s story and I truly think it’s only in there to make Dixie’s family look better. Sue may neglect her kids, but at least she doesn’t shove bread down their throat- she barely feeds them at all!

The climax of this book is Mary jumping out of her bedroom window to get away from her nutty mother and landing on Dixie, injuring them both. Dixie believes she has died, and I actually think she did and the final chapter is a dream because it feels so incongruous.

The final chapter has Dixie waking up in a hospital bed with two broken legs, surrounded by her family and Bruce and even her adulterous father. They explain Mary’s mother was mentally ill (as if they had any business knowing) and Sue apologises for being a terrible mum herself. The final line is Sue delivering an empty platitude; We’ll all be Diamond girls together.

A lot of Wilson books are defended on their ‘realism’. This book has no realism, it entirely felt like a caricature of the kind of family who receives benefits; a feckless mother with a dozen boyfriends letting her kids run wild and her daughters sleep around.

I will add that I myself was raised by a single mum on benefits in the UK. I don’t have different dads to my siblings, but I know what it’s like to live like the Diamonds somewhat. Jackie had potential here, but her issue is that she can’t write a warm, loving, caring family so to try and prove that point was a lost cause.

I see Jackie’s 2013 book Lily Alone as an improved version of the Diamond Girls. The kids in that have different dads, but this isn’t made to be a lurid spectacle. The mother Kate Green in Lily Alone is villainous, but she is human. A terrible, selfish, delusional human but so very vivid and real because the narrative embraces that fact. Sue is a flat stereotype who becomes more unlikable the more Jackie desperately attempts to paint her as a ‘loving mum’

After reading this, keep in mind that book was aimed at 9-12 year olds… THAT BOOK!

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