The Cutprice Guignol

Two brief notes to start with: there will be discussion of eating disorders in this post, if that’s something you’d like to avoid. If you’re just looking for a review of the book, skip to the bolded “review” section!

In 2004, just before I turned ten, I joined the end of a queue that wound all the way out of the Eastgate Shopping Centre in Inverness and out into the slightly-chilly Highland evening beyond. My dad had driven me the hour or so from our rural home in the middle of nowhere to attend a book signing – but not just any book signing. No, I was going to meet Jacqueline f*cking Wilson (cursing censored for the sake of my nine-year-old self).

I grew up as a passionate reader in a family full of even more passionate readers – we had to reinforce the bookcases to hold the ever-expanding collection of novels, short story collections, poetry anthologies, plays, historical non-fiction, and everything else that my parents and brother filled our house with. But, despite the enormous selection to choose from, there was one author that dominated my childhood reading lists, and that was Jacqueline Wilson.

I was obsessed with her books in a way I don’t know I ever have been with an author since: I marked out a tally in my copy of How to Survive Summer Camp every time I read it, till the title page was nearly full. My copy of Lola Rose lived in my schoolbag nearly permanently for about two years, ready to flick through at a moment’s notice. When my mum was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she picked out The Illustrated Mum for me to read, a book that sincerely helped me make sense of the illness she was dealing with.

Wilson – it doesn’t feel right, calling her by her surname, because she was so much a part of my life growing up that she feels almost familiar to me – was arguably at her peak at the time that I got into her books in a big way. The Tracy Beaker TV adaptation was a huge hit, every new release was a big deal, and this particular meet-and-greet was about the most exciting thing that had happened to me, perhaps ever. I waited in that queue for hours, with my slightly-bemused dad (who, bless him, had really not imagined that it would take this long), and, at last, I got to meet her.

I still remember the moment I stepped up to that little, wobbly table she was sitting behind – the way she smiled at me, the rings weighing down her fingers, the way she scribbled my name inside my copy of Best Friends. And I told her, shyly, how much I wanted to be a writer, just like her. She, very sweetly, encouraged me to keep writing, and handed me my book back so my dad could finally get home.

As well as being my favourite author to read, Jacqueline Wilson was the first author I really wanted to be like. Being able to put a face to a name, to see a writer literally right there in front of me as living proof it was possible, never left me. She was a woman, she was British, she wrote these wonderful stories about relationships and friendships and the complexities of where they overlap, she was everything I wanted to be at that age, and hearing from her that I should keep writing and keep trying meant the world to me. I have no doubt I’m one of dozens of little girls who told her the same thing, but her sincerity and kindness stuck with me, as I filled up endless notebooks with scribbled stories, dreaming of one day seeing my own books on the shelves somewhere.

And you know what? I got to. About five years ago, I published my first novel, and I’m very proud (and slightly stunned) to say that I write for a living now. It’s been my dream for as long as I can remember to write for a living, and I get to do that, and, when I reel it back, I know that encounter with Jacqueline Wilson when I was a little girl is a part of why I got here.

So, with all that said, you can imagine how excited I was when I heard of the announcement of her newest book – Think Again, a sequel to her Girls series for teenagers, this time aimed at adult readers. Apart from flicking through a few of her novels for the sake of nostalgia, I haven’t really read anything by her in the better part of fifteen years, but this book was instantly on my to-read list the moment I heard of its release.

Review

Featuring Ellie Allard, the lead of the Girls series, the book follows her as she turns forty and navigates life, love, sex, and ageing, alongside her two best childhood friends, Nadine and Magda. And, again, if I grew up with Jacqueline Wilson, it was these characters who ushered me through the first couple of years of puberty – of all her series, it was the one I read the most (for better and for worse, though we’ll get to that).

And I wanted to love it. I really, truly did. And there are aspects of the story I like – given Wilson’s own recent public coming out, I loved reading about Ellie beginning to explore her own sexuality beyond the straightness that she had taken as a given for her whole life (as a queer woman myself, it felt like such a full-circle moment to see this character I loved and identified with as a kid coming to terms with her sexuality in some ways that paralleled my own coming out experience). Girls Under Pressure, the second book the series, explored Ellie’s eating disorder (in terms that were, in my opinion, too graphic and explicit to put into the hands of a teenage audience – I know that, for me, it was the first time I really became aware of bulimia, and had an influence on my own early forays into purging and restriction), and I appreciated the way Think Again acknowledged the long-term impact of these disorders. Ellie’s relationship with her daughter, Lottie (that name was one of a handful of cute references to Wilson’s other books, too) had some genuine depth to it, and I really felt their relationship came with layers and history despite the fact we only met Lottie in this book.

But the truth is, there’s just too much of a series to follow up on to make this a really satisfying book. The Girls series was four books long, and that felt like plenty of space to follow everything that went down for these three characters – Think Again has to fill two and a half decades of life for these women, as well as touching base with so many other characters, as well as creating a compelling narrative in its own right, and what that leads to is a bit of a mess of plots that don’t get the space to breathe that they really need.

There are so, so many subplots here, the majority of which just didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion for me – from a stalker who peters out after a single confrontation, to a fling with an old teacher that doesn’t particularly explore the interesting dynamics that could have brought up, to a sudden illness of Ellie’s father which resolves in a couple of chapters, very little feels like it’s given the space to fully develop in a way that it has the potential to. Nadine and Magda, solid supporting characters in the original series, are very much sidelined in this book, which could be a comment on the way childhood friends tend to drift away from each other as life gets in the way – but if that was the intention, it’s not presented in a satisfying or compelling way. A few other characters from the existing series are crammed in at a slightly-clunky fortieth birthday celebration that reads more like a chance to check in with characters past than an actual, organic scene in the book.

And, while I love the inclusion of Ellie’s attraction to women in this story, there was so much room to explore it in a more meaningful way. I’m not saying I expected a Jeanette Winterson-esque meditation on sexuality, desire, and lesbianism, since the book had so much to cover in just a few hundred pages, but the book leaves very little space for Ellie to contend with this revelation about herself or what it means for her and her life moving forward. They share their first kiss on the second-last page of the book, pretty much, and we get what amounts to a happy-ever-after to close things up. When so much of the book was dedicated to a relatively repetitive back-and-forth between Ellie and her male love interest, I feel the story would have benefited so much from some more space to have Ellie come to terms with this attraction after an apparent lifetime of utter straightness.

Think Again doesn’t diminish the shine of Wilson’s earlier work for me – next to nothing ever could, to be honest, given the impact she’s had on me and the course of my life. But it did leave me with the feeling that this book would have been better with more space to develop the characters and plots that populate it; perhaps even a series, like the original Girls quadrilogy was. And, while I will always love Wilson’s books, this is probably one I’ll skip on a future re-read.

I would love to hear what you thought of this book, and your relationship with and opinion on Wilson’s work as a whole – especially if you grew up reading her work, like me! Hop into the comments and let me know.

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