Read Jelly free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Jo Cotterill's Jelly is a funny, tender story for 10 year olds about a girl who keeps the whole class laughing and saves the hard feelings for her secret notebook.
Jelly (her real name's Angelica) is eleven and does the BEST impressions. Her teacher Mr Lenck, the principal, the caretaker. She can get the whole class giggling in about ten seconds. So when the school announces its talent show, she's sure this is finally her year.
Here's the thing, though. When a boy suggests she does a walrus for her act, she makes the walrus face and gets the laugh. Jelly calls that Option Two. Laugh it off, every single time.
It's literally like being inside her head. You hear the jokes she makes out loud and then the thoughts she keeps to herself. She's funny, she's quick and she's more hurt than anyone around her realises. At home she writes poems in a pink notebook she keeps hidden under her pillow.
Home isn't easy either. Mum is lovely and very busy, and her boyfriend Chris is properly unpleasant. He makes a crack about Jelly's legs that will make any parent wince (it's meant to). A kind man with a guitar in a coffee shop tells her she's got a great ear for voices. Later, a new boyfriend for Mum, Lennon, is the first to notice that Jelly is putting on a show.
The book is honest about weight and body image. Jelly is teased, she dreads getting changed for PE, and a neighbour shows her an app that makes her face look thinner. She also takes a note from her mum's purse. There's a dare involving a puberty book too, played for giggles.
If your reader is sensitive about how they look, some of this might sting. But if you've got a child who's ever felt they had to be the funny one to be liked, they'll feel very understood. It's warm, it's often laugh-out-loud and it never lectures.
One small thing. This is the American edition, so there's Mom, soccer and dollars instead of Mum, football and pounds.
If Jelly goes down well, A Library of Lemons is another Jo Cotterill story about a girl with a lot going on inside. Calypso would rather read on her own than play, and her dad still won't talk about her mum, who died five years ago.
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