The Diamond Girls
by
Jacqueline Wilson
Illustrator: Nick Sharratt
The Diamond girls are sisters: Martine, Jude, Rochelle and the heroine Dixie, who together comprise a convincing portrait of all the complexities of contemporary family life - complete with the usual sibling rivalries.
Plain Dixie is not pretty or clever or streetwise like her sisters, but she lives in the vivid world of her own imagination with her toy budgie, Bluebell.
When Mum, who is expecting a new baby, decides to move the whole family to another estate, they are aghast to find it is almost derelict. Then Mum goes into labour...
Aimed at older readers, this is ostensibly one of Jacqueline Wilson's more hard-hitting novels. It deals with adult themes of birth, sexuality, teen pregnancy, gang-culture, abuse and post-natal depression, but all in Wilson's usual credible, accessible, first-person narrative style, with a charm and lightness of touch that belies the serious subject-matter.
Publisher: Corgi Children's
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Jacqueline Wilson
Children's Laureate 2005-2007
Jacqueline Wilson was born in Bath in 1945, and spent her childhood in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, where she still lives today. She started her writing career as a teenage journalist with D.C. Thompson, writing for the teenage magazine Jackie which was named after her. Today her popular books for children have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages.Jacqueline's books include The Story of Tracy Beaker, which has become a hugely successful BBC TV series; Girls in Love, which together with its two sequels was filmed for ITV television; and Double Act, which she adapted for Channel 4 and which won the Royal TV Society's Best Children's Fiction Award. As the fourth Children's Laureate (2005-2007) she promoted the importance of sharing books, and reading aloud together.
Visit Jacqueline's website
http://www.jacquelinewilson.co.uk
Jacqueline Wilson -
Nick Sharratt
Nick liked drawing from an early age. 'When I was nine,' he says, 'a picture that I'd drawn at school was pinned up in the hall, and the husband of one of the teachers saw it and offered me five pounds to do a similar picture for him. That's when I decided I was going to be a professional artist one day! I nearly always drew in felt tip pens then, and I liked drawing big crowd scenes. I'd start in the bottom left-hand corner of the paper and just let the picture grow, telling myself stories about each of the characters in turn as I drew them.'
Nick Sharratt
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Reading Age: 10+
Interest level: 12+
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