Rose Rivers (World of Hetty Feather)

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When a young girl, Clover Moon, joins the household as a nursemaid to Rose's troubled sister Beth, and she meets her father's bohemian protégé Paris Walker, she starts to learn more about the wider world. It also opened my eyes to the fact that if children that were troubled now were treated like Beth, the carer would be sent to court. We have many plants in our back garden, and some of them smell, but sweetly, especially the honeysuckle and jasmine.

The time the story is set in changed the way everyone talked and the manners and social etiquette of parties and other occasions. Interestingly, I saw on Instagram yesterday that Daisy May Cooper (Kerry in This Country) reads them herself. Throughout the book Rose expresses her dislike of her life feeling lonely and unwanted several times throughout the novel.

Things take a turn when she befriends a nursery maid and her fathers protage instead of her mums lady friends! Clover and Rose's friendship blossoms throughout the story, but due to the patriarchal inequality of this era, and her mother, a character who has a strong need to fit in, their friendship is kept hidden. Perhaps, when you are eighteen or so, I might send you to Paris to be properly trained, though I know Mama will object!

Mama is the lady of the house and has a distinguished artist husband and seven children and a beautiful home in London and a wardrobe full of new gowns, and yet she’s as miserable as sin. That is meant to be a deadly secret, but I’m actually rather proud to have a father who was once a criminal. However, some of them have very strange endings that leave me feeling like I just took a wrong turn and now I am confused or perplexed that she built up the entire book for a very flimsy ending. She had no qualms about sending my brother Rupert away to school, but she refused to even consider my education.The Jacqueline Wilson books set in different eras are a great way for children to learn about history. She either wraps the story up so quickly that there are too many loose ends, or her characters do a 180-degree turn and make strange decisions.

In 2002 Jacqueline was awarded the OBE for services to literacy in schools and from 2005 to 2007 she was the Children’s Laureate. I gave it a three because of this ending, if it had gone differently it may had been worth a 4 or 5 but I couldn’t after the kiss. Even Papa seems out of his element there, though he sits dutifully beside Mama for half an hour every day, resolutely keeping her company.If I stay as thin and flat as I am now, perhaps I won’t need to wear a corset and all those other hideous underpinnings.