Clover Moon

Clover Moon by Jacqueline Wilson is a Victorian story for 9 year olds about keeping everyone else going while quietly planning your own escape.

What happens

Clover lives in a London alley with her pa, her stepmother Mildred and a house full of younger children. Mondays start at six with the big wash. Baby Bert stays tied to her back while she works.

Then she gets outside, and every child in the alley comes running, because Clover is the one who invents the games.

That afternoon they play sailing ships with the wet sheets on the lines. Clover conjures up a pirate captain with a hook for a hand, mostly to frighten her stepbrother Pete, who has it coming.

You can see why the little ones trail after her. She sticks up for Jimmy Wheels, who gets about on a wooden trolley and is sharp as a tack. She feeds Megs the exact words to say so she will not get into trouble at home.

She has worked out how to survive, too. When a walloping is coming she disappears for a few hours and comes back once Pa is in.

And she can read, which nobody else in the alley can. A shopkeeper called Mr Dolly taught her, because Mildred would not let her go to school.

One thing to weigh up first. Mildred hits the children and Clover gets the worst of it. It is not one dramatic scene. It is the ordinary weather of her life, and she mentions it as calmly as she mentions the washing.

The book also uses the language of its time about disabled people. One boy is called Daft Mo by everybody, and Jimmy's own father is ashamed of him. The story is firmly on those boys' side, but the words will need talking about.

There is grief in this one as well, and it is not a quick moment in passing.

If your reader is ready for that, what they get is a narrator who is funny, fierce and already planning a house in an upturned boat by the sea, with jam for tea.

What to read next

Rose is a good one after this, another Victorian girl with no mother and plenty of nerve. She has grown up in an orphanage, wants a job and a wage rather than a long lost duke for a father, and keeps the other girls going with stories she makes up on the spot.