Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson - Review

My friend Helen sent me this book, which was really nice of her, thinking I would like it. Well, wanting me to read it, at least. Like many others my age I read some Jacqueline Wilson when I was young, but I hadn't ever read the Girls series, on which this is based. So I didn't have the frame of reference for this, and maybe it would have helped if I had? I ended up just not really liking this and finding it really weird. I said as much to Helen and she agreed that it was odd, so I'm glad it wasn't just me!

So, the protagonist of the book is Ellie. She is turning forty at the beginning of the book. She wants to spend the day with her beloved daughter, Lottie, who has just started university, but Lottie cancels on her at the last minute. So Ellie goes swimming and she meets Alice. Ellie is the artist of a comic strip that appears in the Guardian - a mouse called Myrtle - which it turns out to have been cancelled by the paper just before Ellie's birthday and Alice knows of it. She ends up dragging Ellie to get the mouse tattooed. Now I am a person with a lot of tattoos and I thought the description of Ellie getting the tattoo was spot on, but I thought the depiction of the aftercare was absolutely terrible! Ellie first of all has a bandage on it, and then she goes swimming about a week later! It's not hard to do your research!

Anyway, Ellie ends up being thrown a surprise party. There's her dad, her stepmum Anna, her brother Ben, her brother in law Simon, Lottie, and her two best friends Nadine and Magda. Then there's a bunch of other people from her life including an old PE teacher Mrs Henderson, a woman who once encouraged her drawing career, and I dunno, a bunch of others. It got confusing. She gets back in touch with her old art teacher, Gary because of this party. 

Ellie, having lost the comic gig, decides to write a graphic novel about elephants. Alice can help her with this, because she has researched elephants a lot. But her girlfriend Wendy doesn't like Ellie at all, which isn't really investigated properly. Ellie then starts a relationship with her old teacher, Gary, which is very weird and creepy and not at all fine! They have really good sex but otherwise he's a bit boorish and annoying. He lectures her. He doesn't like the flat she lives in. She says she 'can't' break up with him but it's like -- why not? You don't owe him anything! Just break it off! She spends literally half the book fannying about with this. 

Then there's Magda and Nadine. Nadine is her 'old self', still falling in and out of bed with loads of men. Magda is pregnant but the baby's dad is Chris, who Ellie and Nadine don't like. They don't like his kids either. But there's no reason given why they dislike him so much. It's very surface.

In fact the whole thing is surface. And as a woman who turned forty in the same year that this was published I did have to think that no, we're not all as vacuous and self involved as Ellie. She had had some genuine trauma in her life but that too was skated over. 

In all I'm giving this two out of five and not a scrap more.