Opal Plumstead

Jacqueline Wilson's Opal Plumstead is a historical story for 10 year olds about a fiercely clever girl who's about to lose everything she's worked for.

What happens

Opal is top of the class at St Margaret's, a scholarship girl who reads Dracula for fun and can't stop drawing genies into her still-life homework. Her art teacher is not impressed. Neither is her mother. It's Opal's big sister Cassie, with her gorgeous hair and her job in a hat shop, who gets all the fuss.

Opal adores her father. He's a gentle, clever man who spends all day at a desk in a shipping office and writes novels every evening that nobody wants. So when a publisher finally likes one, the whole house goes giddy. Champagne. Fish and fried potatoes. New things bought on tick. Father even whirls Mother round the kitchen.

You can't help feeling nervous for them. Things go badly wrong for the Plumsteads when Father ends up in prison. Opal's scholarship is gone, and so is her hope of university, and she has to go to work in a sweet factory to help keep the family going. There she meets the factory's owner, who introduces her to Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes. And the owner's son, Morgan, who Opal decides is her soulmate.

Opal tells the story herself and she's brilliant company. She's prickly and funny and a bit of a snob (and she knows it). She's rude about Cassie one minute and cuddled up in bed with her the next. Anyone who's ever felt like the plain, clever one in the family will recognise her straight away.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Opal is in her teens and this reads older than its shelf. She and her best friend giggle about sweethearts and what they might actually get up to. There's talk of corsets and figures, and Cassie wants a story about a dark lover on a white stallion. It's all very innocent, but a romance is clearly on its way.

A reader who loves historical heroines with big feelings will adore her.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Rose Rivers is another clever Jacqueline Wilson heroine with a governess, who'd much rather draw than do as she's told.