The Polka Dot Shop

Laurel Remington's The Polka Dot Shop is a warm friendship story for 10 year olds about a girl who can't bear wearing clothes from her mum's secondhand shop.

What happens

Andy was eleven when her school scrapped uniforms. Everyone else cheered. Andy's heart sank, because she knew exactly where her new clothes would come from.

Her mum runs Eliza's Emporium, a cluttered vintage shop at the wrong end of the high street. So Andy got a peeling Hello Kitty T-shirt, leggings that stopped well short of her ankles and a pink fake-fur jacket. Before long, the mean girls were calling her Rags.

Two years on she's thirteen and she STILL hates it. She even buys her own new knickers in secret with money from the biscuit tin, so she doesn't have to wear anybody else's (which is very funny and a little bit heartbreaking).

She does have two lovely friends. Carrie, who she got to know over a shared plate of chips. And Stevie, who uses a wheelchair, loves Doctor Who and wants to study physics like her hero Stephen Hawking.

Then, sorting through bin bags in the stockroom, Andy finds a thick white paper bag from a Paris department store. Inside there's Yves St Laurent silk and a black Chanel dress covered in white polka dots. It fits her perfectly!

What would you do? Andy hides the bag under all the others.

She tells the story herself, and she's very honest about feeling jealous and guilty all at once. She loves her mum. She just can't stand the shop.

And something is wrong with Mum. Andy hears her crying one night and doesn't know how to ask about it. That thread gives all the fashion fun a bit of weight.

Andy's dad died when she was four (that's backstory, not part of the plot). There's also some unkind name-calling about bodies and weight at school, which Andy stands up to.

If your child has ever felt they were wearing the wrong thing, this will ring very true. And if they love clothes, they'll be itching to get into that stockroom themselves.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, they might also like The Secret Cooking Club, where Scarlett's mum writes a blog about her daughter's most embarrassing moments (knickers included) and Scarlett just wants to hide.