The Tracy Beaker Trilogy

The Tracy Beaker Trilogy

by Jacqueline Wilson

Illustrated by Nick Sharratt, Publisher: Doubleday, 2006, 592 pages, Hard cover, Black & white, Price:Rs. 599/-, Purchased from : Broadway Bookstore, Panjim, Kind of book: Children's Fiction

Reviewed by Havana-Kay Menezes

This book is about a little girl of about 11 years, whose name is Tracy Beaker. She has been put into care because of her mother’s boyfriend’s behaviour towards her. She has a belief that her mum is a famous actress and that she will be famous someday too. Immediately you find out that she is a girl like you’ve never met before. She is violent to the children in the home and rude to the teachers and care-takers that try to help her. Tracy never seems to see her mum though she mentions her a lot. Some of the children laugh at some of the things she says her mum does. Tracy keeps saying her mum is coming to see her, you don’t know if it is true but her friends think she is lying. Tracy explains what care and fostering means as the book goes along.

This is a trilogy which means a set of three books; I am going to tell you about one of them - the second book titled Starring Tracy Beaker.

Book Two is mainly set at Kinglea Junior School. The drama teacher Miss Simkins, is planning to put on the play A Christmas Carol. Tracy gets picked for the leading part of Scrooge. It is not an easy journey from getting the part to the actual performance.

Tracy has an arch enemy called Justine Littlewood but Tracy calls her things like – ‘Justine Hate Her Gutts Littlewood’. She uses many expressions that I do not use or hear. She is very rude to her teachers, calling one of them ‘Teacher Vomit Bagley’. She actually hits Justine and she has to go to hospital. I didn’t like Tracy Beaker much, she was rude and violent. The nicest character was a boy called Peter, he was thoughtful and caring.

It's Christmas time and Tracy spends all of her allowance on gifts for one person, believing that they will come and visit her and see her perform as Scrooge. You’ll have to read the book to see if it was worthwhile.

The book was funny in some places but the only part of her life I could identify with was the relationships between friends and the trouble they can sometimes cause.

How the performance goes, if she is left with any friends and whether or not her mum comes you will have to find out by reading the book...

The book was a birthday gift, it has a really nice cover and cool illustrations. It was a good experience to try this kind of book. I normally read books like Journey to the River Sea, Igraine the Brave and of course the Percy Jackson series.

This was not really my type of book. It was just different and didn’t really appeal to me.

Rating: I give it 5 out of 10

Havana-Kay Menezes

Std 6 – Sunshine Worldwide School, Old Goa