The Story of Tracy Beaker

The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson is a sharp, funny story for 8 year olds about a girl in care who is filling in her own life story and has a great deal to say while she does it.

What happens

Tracy is ten. Someone has given her a book with headings like My Family and Things I Like. She treats every single one of them as an argument.

Her favourite colour is blood red, so watch out. Her lucky number is seven, which she points out did her no good at all when she actually was seven and nobody picked her.

You are reading over her shoulder the whole way. She crosses things out. She tells fibs and then owns up to them on the very next line. (She swears she never cries. It is hay fever.)

That is what makes her such good company. She is rude about absolutely everyone and very funny with it. Then something slips through that she did not really mean you to see.

She is still waiting for her mum. In Tracy's version her mum is pretty, good fun, always arriving with presents, and just a bit hard to pin down at the moment.

Her social worker Elaine gets the worst of it. Tracy asks Elaine to foster her, half as a joke, then calls her fat and boring the second the answer is no. You can see straight through it and that is the point.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Tracy is in care because her mum's boyfriend hit her, and she says so quite matter of factly in the opening pages. A foster mother used to smack her. She was locked in a room on her own at a previous home when she was little.

None of it is dwelt on and all of it is backstory rather than something that happens in front of you. Even so, a child who worries about grown ups being unkind might want you nearby for the first few chapters.

If your reader is happy with that, what they get is a narrator with LOTS of opinions, no volume control, and no idea how much she is giving away.

What to read next

If they like Tracy, they will probably get on with The Great Gilly Hopkins. Gilly has also decided that being difficult is safer than being disappointed, and she turns up at her third foster home in three years fully intending to be as unmanageable as she possibly can.