Lola Rose

Jacqueline Wilson's Lola Rose is a family story for 9 year olds about a girl holding her family together while her mum makes one bad decision after another.

What happens

The girl telling it is called Jayni. Her mum is Nikki, her little brother is Kenny, and Nikki has just won ten thousand pounds on a scratch card outside the corner shop.

Nikki whirls Kenny round in the street, then takes them both back in to buy whatever they want. Kenny picks a red ice lolly and a Thomas the Tank Engine comic. It's what he always picks and he won't be talked into anything else.

Jayni's first thought is that nobody can tell Dad.

You find out why almost immediately. She talks about her father in exactly the same chatty voice she uses for chocolate and magazines and her hair, which is what makes it hit so hard. He's good-looking. He sang in a band. He calls her his princess. He also did time for GBH and he's put her mum in hospital more than once.

Jayni does all the mopping up in that house. Her mum after a bad night. Her brother, who gets shoved over in the playground and lies there snivelling until she comes.

She does everyone's worrying for them, and she's funny while she's at it, which somehow makes it worse.

There's a lovely bit where Nikki gets the winnings in five-pound notes, because that looks like more, and throws the lot in the air. All three end up scattering it round the living room like leaves. You can see exactly how this family works. Nikki is the child and Jayni is not.

The title, by the way, is a name Jayni hasn't got yet.

Now the serious part. The violence in this book is not hinted at, it's described. Jayni sits and listens while her father works through her mother in the next room, then goes in afterwards, holds a cold flannel to her face and wonders whether to ring an ambulance. She sees the bruises in the bath a few days later. There's an affair, a grandmother who died of cancer, and a grandfather who told his daughter at the funeral that it was her fault. All of this is in the opening chapter, so there's no gentle run-up to it.

Read that chapter yourself before you pass the book on. If any of it sits near your own family, or your child is easily frightened, this is not the one.

For a reader who already goes looking for books about families in trouble, Jayni is tremendous company. She's funny, she's furious, and she never once asks you to feel sorry for her.

What to read next

There's another Wilson girl doing the parenting in The Illustrated Mum. Dolphin and her big sister make their mum a birthday card and then watch her cry over it, and you can feel both of them working out how bad things are about to get.