The Other Edie Trimmer

The Other Edie Trimmer by Jacqueline Wilson is a story for 11 year olds about a girl who wants a part in Oliver! more than she has ever wanted anything.

What happens

Edie has wanted to act since she was five. She once launched herself off her bed hoping she'd fly like Mary Poppins and needed ten stitches in her forehead.

Now a theatre on the seafront is putting Oliver! on for six weeks, and they're casting children from her Saturday stage school. Edie is the best actor there. Everybody says so. Edie says so too.

She doesn't get a part. Not Oliver, not the Artful Dodger, not even one of the eight unnamed orphans. Her best friend Alex gets Oliver.

That's the bit that will stay with your reader. Edie says all the right things out loud, and she means them, and she is also completely gutted. Both of those are true at once. She holds it together the whole day and then howls in the car on the way home.

She even asks for the feedback. It turns out they thought she was too sure of herself to play a timid little boy, and her singing voice was too strong.

Then the summer goes quietly wrong. Alex is always rehearsing. Liam, who Edie can't stand, puts his arm round Alex when she cries at rehearsal, and Alex doesn't quite look Edie in the eye when she mentions it.

Jacqueline Wilson is so good on this. Nobody falls out. Nobody is horrible. Your friend just ends up somewhere you can't follow, and there's nothing to be cross about, which somehow makes it worse.

After that the book turns into something else altogether. A Victorian notebook, a story Edie starts writing about a workhouse girl, and a version of Victorian London that is a great deal less fun to be in than it was to imagine.

Nothing in the opening chapters will upset anybody. Going by the book's own cover copy, the Victorian half brings real poverty and the threat of a workhouse, so it doesn't stay in dressing-up territory.

If you've got a reader who is deep in a school play or a Saturday drama club right now, this will go down very well indeed. It's also one for anyone who has ever come a close second to their own best friend and had to be pleased about it.

What to read next

If Edie's Oliver obsession catches, try Unexpected Twist! An Oliver Twisted Tale, which is in the library too. Michael Rosen runs Dickens's actual words alongside a girl called Shona who keeps getting into trouble at her new school without ever working out how.