Jacqueline Wilson Has Amnesia?

When I was younger, I used to love her books (maybe this is part of the issue) but as I began to grow up, I started to notice how inherently samey the vast majority of her books have become. Most of them involve either a broken family or a single parent household with children who have to grow up and look after themselves in some way shape or form.

I understand that this is a big issue and a fairly common one in society today, but out of the 500 books she's written, surely we don't need 450 going over the same stuff all the time.

That said, one of her most recent was Love Lessons and even though I'm nearly 19, I still thought it was good of her address those particular issues for a change.

Woman you can write! Just write something different so my children's eyes wont fall out when I finally have some.

edited 6th Sep '10 1:23:59 PM by Xanisani

Ah, this takes me back. Didn't realise she'd written 500 book though.

I see what you mean- she does seem to stick to the old 'broken family' plot, and something else I noticed even as a kid was that unless there was a reason for them to have a sibling, a lot of her protagonists were only children.

I like what she does though. OK, she's a bit samey, but she flies in the face of all the people who think that children can't handle anything dark, depressing or scary in their fiction. They were books for 8- 12 year olds that contained death, child abuse, spousal abuse, neglect, addiction, poverty... she tackled so many themes that many people consider no-go for children's literature... and those books became bestselling. Which is awesome.

In this regard she's like Meg Cabot for me. Not in their content (or even quality), obviously, but in the fact that they basically write the same book over and over again. I find it very hard to tell her books apart, even if I did kind of enjoy them back then.

I did enjoy Jacqueline Wilson books, but her portrayal of Nadine in "Girls in Love" as a goth seriously erked me. Not all goths dress in head to too in black. Hell, I know a goth who wears pink!

I used to love Jacqueline Wilson until I was about twelve (I still flick through my old books occasionally now) and would always buy the new book as soon as it came out, but eventually I stopped reading mainly for this reason. The clincher for me was Clean Break, which didn't even try to hide the fact it was reusing old plot elements. I liked the book, but it made me think she was never going to anything different, as she was acknowledging it herself, so I just stopped bothering.