We Are the Beaker Girls & Hetty Feather's Christmas

 I've been aware of Jacqueline Wilson for a long time, but it took a chapter of The Haunted Wood to prompt me to actually read a couple of her (many, many) books. They are aimed a bit younger than I would usually go for, and they are a very attractive package -- big print, nice short chapters, interspersed with charming illustrations by Nick Sharratt. 

Bolshie child-in-care Tracy Beaker has become a classic in the UK, and We Are the Beaker Girls features Tracy all grown up and with a daughter of her own, but still as bold and fiery as ever, and still involved in the care system, this time as a prospective foster parent herself. I really enjoyed the way Tracy and Jess gather a family around them in their new home, and the way Tracy, though she's an adult, is shown to be still growing and learning.

Hetty Feather's Christmas seems to be a kind of bonus story, a Christmas special, in a series about Hetty's life as a Victorian era foundling -- not an orphan, not abandoned, but a victim of a society that wouldn't allow her and her mother to be together. The cruel matron of the foundling hospital is contrasted with kind benefactress Miss Smith, who whisks Hetty away for a magical Christmas day with the artistic Rivers family. At least, it's fairly magical, but issues of class, gender and neuro-diversity are gently present to give the reader food for thought.

I can see why Jacqueline Wilson's books are so popular. They are effortlessly engaging, lively and very relatable, with ordinary kids who act up, are sometimes kind and sometimes thoughtless, lots of humour and a bit of action. It's a fabulous formula. They probably wouldn't have appealed to child-me -- I liked a bit of magic or some history in my reading, in fact I tended to shy away from 'modern' books (books I now read as historic fiction, ha), but Wilson's massive popularity speaks for itself.