Rose Rivers

Jacqueline Wilson's Rose Rivers is a Victorian story for 9 year olds about a girl with a governess, six brothers and sisters and absolutely no way out.

What happens

Rose is thirteen. Her twin brother Rupert is fifteen minutes older, and last week he went off to boarding school with a trunk, a tuck box and their grandfather's gold watch.

Rose is going nowhere. Her mother would not even discuss it. Girls get Miss Rayner in the nursery schoolroom.

So she writes to Rupert. Every single day. He sends one short note home to their parents with "Say hello to Rose and the others" tacked on the end.

Not even a message of her own. She has to share it.

Her father gives her a sketchbook to cheer her up. He is the painter Edward Rivers and he would dearly love one of his children to have inherited the talent. Rose draws witches and dragons and goblins, giving the goblins the faces of people she cannot stand. Then she tries to sketch her father properly and he comes out lopsided and fierce, when he is the mildest man she knows.

She carries the book about so it looks as though she is working. The pages stay blank.

What makes Rose such good company is that she tells you everything. Her mother's novels are silly romantic tosh. Spectacles would make her look scholarly. She cannot see what is so terrible about being a spinster, given Miss Rayner seems perfectly happy with three patched frocks and a bag of fruit drops.

Her mother, meanwhile, tells her she wanders about like a ragamuffin and will ruin her forehead with all that reading.

The house is stuffed with people. Six brothers and sisters, a butler, a cook, a parlourmaid, a housemaid, a boot boy and a little general skivvy called Mary-Jane. Rose notices every one of them, including the ones whose whole job is to go unnoticed. Taken round her grandfather's jute mill, she cannot stop thinking about the girls her own age working twelve hour days in that smell.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

She is unwell, she is sharp with everybody, and she makes no secret of finding her daughter a disappointment. Nothing frightening happens. But if you've got a child who takes unkindness to heart, there is a steady drip of it here and no tidy apology at the end of a chapter. What balances it is her father, who lets her argue with him and actually listens.

What to read next

And if your reader wants the other side of that Victorian street, Clover Moon has a girl in the same city with no governess and no gold watch, minding a houseful of little ones for a stepmother who slaps, and reading better than any of them because a Mr Dolly taught her the letters her stepmother would not let her learn at school.