This book came in at #31 on the BBC The Big Read list of Britain’s favorite books. All in all, Jacqueline Wilson had seven books in the top 200. Pretty amazing to me, since I’d never heard of her. I immediately marked her down as someone to check out. Well, on having read Tracy Beaker I can see why they haven’t caught on in the US. The writing is very British. There was slang in here even I didn’t know. A tough sell for a US kid, I think. That aside, I can see why they are popular; Tracy’s a tough, funny little brat.
And then, Jenny called me into the kitchen because she made out she wanted a hand getting the lunch ready, but that was just a ploy. Jenny doesn’t smack. She doesn’t even often tell you off. She just uses ploys and tries to distract you. It sometimes works with thicker kids but it usually has no effect whatsoever on me. However, I quite like helping in the kitchen because you can generally nick a spoonful of jam or a handful of raisins when Jenny’s back is turned. So I went along to the kitchen and helped her put an entire shoal of fish fingers under the double grill while she got the chip pan bubbling. Fish fingers don’t taste so great when they’re raw. I tried nibbling just to see. I don’t know what they’re called fish fingers. They don’t have fingers, do they? They ought to be fish fins. That Aunty Peggy used to make this awful milk pudding called tapioca which had these little slimy bubbly bits and I told the other kids that they were fish eyes. And I told the really little ones that marmalade is made out of goldfish and they believed that too.
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