TRACY BEAKER
By Jacqueline Wilson
THE ROMAN MYSTERIES (Orion)
By Caroline Lawrence
J.K. Rowling gets a lot of attention, and rightly so, her books have influenced an entire generation. But do you know who the next best selling children’s writer is?
She was Children’s Laureate for 2006/07, and her most famous creation must be Tracy Beaker, a series of books which has spun off into TV shows, a stage play and full length film, not to mention school bags, pencil cases, lunch boxes...
Significant talent
Jacqueline Wilson has a significant talent. She writes in a style which is accessible for the newly-confident reader, and yet covers subjects and emotions with a wit and sensitivity which will satisfy many older girls. Her books cover painful situations of bereavement, poverty, bullying, foster care, divorce and step-parents. Tracy Beaker, for example, is in a children’s home, after two failed fostering arrangements.
Tracy is bright and very stroppy, insightful and rebellious. Narrated in the first person, and packed with amusing illustrations, the book touchingly pictures Tracy’s courage and sadness, but still ends very optimistically. In this way the book is very typical of Wilson’s work (and the many writers who have followed her award winning style), using the first person voice to combine pathos with humour and hope. Tracy dreams about her mum being too busy as a film star to come and take her home. When shown compassion she ‘feels her hayfever coming on’ — she cries. No wonder she has such a following among children and the adults who care for them. These books get kids reading, encourage empathy and show ‘real life situations’.
Normalising the traumatic
So what makes me uneasy about these books; is it snobbery that I don’t like my ten-year-old reading about messy families and tattoos? Possibly. But I do have other concerns. The reality Wilson presents is only very partial. Fiction, of course, is not reality. Real life is often boring and has a limited number of happy endings, but fiction needs to have an emotional reality. Wilson chooses gritty ‘real life’ scenarios, yet her resolutions are not gritty enough, they do not speak of emotional reality.
Tracy Beaker meets Cam, a writer researching children’s homes, they strike up a friendship and it starts to look as if Cam might foster Tracy. The hard nut Tracy starts to crack, and for the first time shows sympathy to another. Excuse me?? The real horror of repeated abandonment is not overturned by someone buying a birthday cake. Likewise in her other books we see quick fixes; a child of divorce (The Suitcase Kid) coping because an elderly couple let her play in their garden, a very confused bereaved girl is rescued by a ghost and turns the corner (Vicky Angel). Jacqueline Wilson normalises trials which, though increasingly common, must not be seen as normal, and then offers shallow solutions which minimise the moral and emotional complexities caused by such trials. In this way she reflects our society, and especially our educational world, which underestimates both sin and the damage it does, in an attempt not to exclude. I do steer my children from Wilson’s books, not because I don’t want them to find out about broken families, homelessness or bullying (they see those all around them), but because they need to know that these situations are not sad mistakes, but a result of sin, and that for damaged people sympathy or inclusion on their own don’t work; real healing is found in Jesus alone and wholeness comes by living under his rule.
Instead I suggest
If I’ve knocked Jacqueline Wilson off your Christmas list, may I suggest a replacement? Caroline Lawrence has produced a set of adventure/whodunits for children which are set in the Roman Empire in about 100AD. They star Jonathan, a Jewish Christian, Flavia, a freeborn Roman, Nubia, a freed African slave girl, and Lupus, a mute orphan. Somehow these four seem to solve complex mysteries which bring them into contact with the Emperor Titus, gladiators, kidnappers, dolphins. Need I say more?
If these seem escapist, and unhelpful for the child facing Real Life Issues (as Wilson depicts), then let me tell you that the stories Lawrence tells have an incredible truthfulness. The world of Rome is very like that of 21st-century London, but more exciting; it is multicultural and violent, with broken families and friends who play and learn together. And yet it is a different world, and the adventures are of a different magnitude. Stories which take us beyond our world and yet speak into it are usually the best entertainment and a means of communicating important truth, and this is what Caroline Lawrence does so well. She confronts bereavement, bitterness, weakness, young love and jealousy, using echoes from classical myth and biblical narratives. My children are all thoroughly addicted, and after lights out I sneak them from under their pillows for my own fix. The stories are in school libraries and secular bookshops and yet they clearly present what it means to be a Christian in a multicultural world. They might not win prizes, but they are meeting a great need and delighting many families.
Sarah Allen
