Recently, there’s been a resurgence of people reminiscing on books that left irreparable damage to their childhoods on TikTok and, as someone who religiously read Jacqueline Wilson books before the age of ten, I feel very qualified to contribute to this conversation.
I will only be talking about the books that I’ve read and still have haunting my bookshelves, but I am very aware that there is infinite more Jacqueline Wilson books out in the world that have more vaguely traumatic content, such as the mummified cat, the art teacher, and a girl getting paralysed on a swing. And the entirety of Vicky Angel? Not in my personal top five, but I still think about it often.
This blog is full of spoilers. Let’s begin!
#5 Secrets
This book follows two girls named Treasure and India who live completely different lives, and they become friends when Treasure goes to live with her grandmother and starts at India’s school. They bond over keeping diaries.
The book opens with Treasure’s stepdad hitting her with his belt. Her grandmother shows up out of nowhere and takes her to the hospital to get stitches, and I think this is the first time I’ve seen a character in a Jacqueline Wilson book call out a parent (in this case, Treasure’s complicit mother) for being a bad parent. The mother is more concerned about the hospital seeing the wound and calling social services than her boyfriend being a literal abuser. However, the grandmother doesn’t reveal how the injury occurred because she doesn’t want to snitch on her daughter, as much as she dislikes the boyfriend.
In contrast, India loves her dad, but dislikes her mother, because is it really a Jacqueline Wilson book if it doesn’t include bodyshaming? She learned about World War II and Anne Frank in a school history lesson and related to the story so much that she addressed her diary entries to Anne Frank. Inspired by this story, when she hears Treasure’s intent to run away from home because her stepfather is coming after her, she hides Treasure in her attic.
This book has the usual sensitive Jacqueline Wilson topics, but it’s balanced out with characters that I found interesting and engaging, and a surprise happy ending, even if I can’t fully remember what that ending was.
#4 Kiss
This book didn’t contribute to my childhood trauma as much as the other Jacqueline Wilson books I’ve revisited, but I wanted to reread it because it holds two core memories for me: it’s the first (and potentially only?) book I’ve read where the main character has a period, and it was the first book I read with a gay main character. This was a minimum of ten years ago, so much has changed.
Sylvie and Carl grew up next door to each other and created a fantasy world together in the shed where Carl keeps his glass collection and always referred to each other as ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’. As teens, they don’t spend as much time together as Carl becomes more distant, but Sylvie still sees him as her boyfriend in her head and sees a future where they’re together. But they’re at an age where they’re making friends outside of each other and their lives are starting to go on different paths as much as Sylvie clings to the fantasy. Carl starts getting bullied at school after a game of Spin the Bottle ignites his crush on another boy, and he smashes his glass collection in a fit of rage and ends up with cuts all over his arms and wrists that may or may not be intentional.
This book goes all in on what is basically an introduction to homophobia and discovering sexuality and changing bodies and platonic love, and also a scene where the guy Carl likes is showing off a girl’s nudes? Slutshaming also happens in this book, it really covers all areas of being a teenager.
#3 My Sister Jodie
This is a book that was so memorable to me at a young age that I did not need to reread it for this post. We have Pearl, a ten- or eleven-year-old who’s a victim of bullying, and her sister Jodie, who’s fourteen and rebellious in a way that teenagers who get piercings and dye their hair are considered rebellious. Their parents move them to the boarding school where they work, and Pearl’s life gets easier, but Jodie’s gets harder. She starts getting slutshamed for talking to boys and ends up in a relationship with the school’s nineteen-year-old gardener. When they break up, he dates another teenager.
Jodie gets in trouble for telling ghost stories to younger children and saying that they’re real, and she decides to prank them by covering herself with a white sheet and making them believe that ghosts are real. When she’s in the tower for the most infamous scene in the book, she’s trying to redeem herself and tell the other kids that the ghosts have just been her all along, and this is where she opens the window and falls and breaks her neck and dies. It was the first time I read something where the main character ended up dying in a gruesome way, and other characters speculated that it was suicide.
#2 The Diamond Girls
This one is about four sisters who have four different dads, and I really adore how realistic the sibling dynamics are. The first dad was sixteen at the time. The second dad was a drug addict and died from an overdose. The third dad is abusive towards the mother, and she gets breast cancer around this time. The fourth dad is an embalmer, so the sisters make a lot of jokes about dead bodies at the expense of the dad and the sister who belongs to him.
The book opens with the mother—pregnant with her fifth child—moving the sisters to what is supposed to be their dream home, but turns out to be completely dilapidated, and she goes into labour immediately. She returns home a day or two later and one sister has been in a fight, the twelve-year-old one has a new sixteen-year-old boyfriend, and another has vanished and turns out to be pregnant too. The final sister spends a lot of time befriending the little girl next door and looking after what she believes to be her baby brother but is soon revealed to be her baby sister, and her mother is lying about the gender because she wanted a son that badly. And then the little girl whose name escapes me jumps out of a window because she wants to be a bird and escape her abusive mother and complicit father? This makes me question Jacqueline Wilson’s mental stability.
I’m not sure what the message of this one is supposed to be – one mother has such severe OCD that she abuses her child, and the other mother is emotionally neglectful because she thinks her new baby will ‘fix’ her life. The oldest sister, who is barely sixteen, is the one running the household when she’s present, and it falls apart the moment she leaves the page. All sisters are fighting for their mother’s attention. And the narrator relies on a toy bird for emotional support so heavily that there are scenes where she believes it has truly come to life.
And before I reveal the Jacqueline Wilson book that has had the most defining impact on my life, I would like to share some dishonourable mentions.
One is Dustbin Baby: everything about this book is sad. It’s just over one hundred pages long and takes place over one day, but it’s crammed with so much sadness. She skips school and goes on a trip down memory lane, visiting the first care home she went to as a baby, a quest to find a friend from a group foster home, and the pizza shop where she was found in the dustbin. Her being dumped in the bin as soon as she was born was one of the happier parts of this story. However, it is ultimately a short story about found family and second chances.
Another is The Illustrated Mum: specifically, when Marigold paints herself fully white to be ‘perfect’ again. This is a book that has somehow become darker as both it and I age, and I empathise more with the parent being mentally unwell and not being in full control of her decisions. However, to this day, she is still the main inspiration for me wanting tattoos.
And finally, the Jacqueline Wilson book that ignited my childhood trauma is…
#1 Midnight
It’s probably been over fifteen years since I first (and last) read this book, and it still haunts me even to this day. Now, as I reread it, I’ve realised that I’d completely forgotten the real horrors of this little book.
This book follows thirteen-year-old Violet, and it focuses on the dynamic between her and her brother Will who is revealed to be adopted and is acting out in response to this news. They were close as children, and Violet always believed Will was magic, a changeling child just like in the books she loves and is the safe space she returns to constantly. Side note: she describes the author of her favourite books as ‘the only man for me’ and ‘the age difference would be minimal’ if she was ten years older. There’s also a weird scene in the second half of the book where Violet says she wanted to marry her brother when she was younger, and I live in fear of what this book would be if it wasn’t written for children.
As the book progresses, you start to see how…complex this sibling relationship is. Will is either borderline abusive or straight-up abusive to Violet. There’s a scene where they’re playing a ‘Blind Man’ game where he blindfolds her and leads her into the attic of the abandoned house next door and they get attacked by bats. She says she’s scared of him and standing up to him, but she loves him and wants him to treat her like he did before he found out he was adopted to replace a deceased baby. He is named after the deceased baby, just to make things worse. Violet also compares their relationship to their parents’ abusive relationship.
At some point in the book, she makes a friend called Jasmine, but she’s afraid of the friendship not being real and Jasmine having a crush on Will. There is a scene where Jasmine and Will kiss, and Violet briefly runs away to visit her elusive author. There’s a lot of comments in this book that aged poorly or honestly should’ve been left out in the first place, like the fatshaming and one of Violet’s friends referring to her friendship with Jasmine as ‘some kind of pervy crush’.
It’s all fun and games to joke about books causing childhood trauma in a way that is far from what childhood trauma actually is, and books that have had a lasting impact for better or for worse. Still, ultimately Jacqueline Wilson is a pioneer in helping young readers learn to see through other perspectives, see different lifestyles, and learn empathy. Back then, it almost felt like I was having infinite friends my age in all of these situations.
If you have suffered irreversible damage at the hands of Jacqueline Wilson, please let me know in the comments below, and also please let me know if there are any other children’s authors out there who may or may not have ruined your life.
TandeWrites 