The Primrose Railway Children

The Primrose Railway Children by Jacqueline Wilson is a family story for 9 year olds, told by a girl who adores her dad and is the last person to find out what has gone wrong.

What happens

Phoebe knows something is up. Her parents have stopped arguing properly and started whispering in another room, which is much worse. She heard them down in the kitchen at half past two in the morning.

School isn't helping either. Amelie has gone off her. They've been best friends since Reception, when Phoebe made her a pink bead necklace and Amelie made her a blue one.

Now Amelie has Kate. They do dance routines in the playground, and when Phoebe tries to join in they look at each other with their lips twitching.

Then Phoebe hears Amelie offering Kate something awful about her dad, if she swears never to tell.

That bit is horribly well done. Phoebe stands there running through her own shameful secrets, waiting to hear which one it'll be. The wet tights in Year Two. The poem she copied out of a book and passed off as hers (Dad thought it was marvellous, then Mum Googled the first line).

Her dad used to be properly famous. He made a CBeebies programme called Robinson, about a little dough man on a pretend island who chatted to his vegetables and once held races with his runner beans.

Then Robinson went out of fashion and so did he, and he has been trying to get something else made ever since.

The family round her is very recognisable. Perry is keeping a newt in the bath and won't let anyone near a tap. Becks is fourteen and can't be hugged at the school gate.

And Phoebe is clear-eyed about where she comes in her mum's affections. Becks is the one who's like her. Perry is top of the class. Phoebe reckons she isn't particularly anything, except good at making things up. Your reader may read that line twice.

Then Dad goes, with no warning. People with cameras start turning up at the door. Mum pulls all three children out of school, then drives them to a tumbledown cottage miles from anywhere, near an old steam railway.

She says Dad is away on a secret job for a TV company. It doesn't hold together.

Some of this is close to the bone. A father vanishes, the grown-ups aren't telling the truth about why, there are photographers outside, and a best friendship comes apart in detail.

If your child has had a parent leave, or is losing a friend to somebody else, parts of this will land hard. If they'd rather read something honest about how that feels, this is the right author for it.

What to read next

There's another girl sent away from everything she knows in The Return of the Railway Children. Edie spends her nights down in Piccadilly Tube station while the bombs come down, before she's packed off to an aunt she has never met.