Children's author turns life's blows into magic

By MARGIE THOMSON

Jacqueline Wilson isn't what you expect, given the gritty nature of her novels, but when you meet her you realise that she looks just like what she is: one of the queens of children's literature.

Her wrists and fingers drip and clank with silver in a most regal fashion. From her spiky, silver hair to the tip of her swish black shoes, she is London-elegant.

And yet she is so charming and warm - she has a quirky openness that renders her immaculate appearance totally unintimidating - that you can well understand the devotion of her small subjects, hundreds of whom queue to see her whenever she appears in public, which is often.

Such has been the success of J.K. Rowling that we tend to forget there are others who live in that rarified air of multimillion sales and multi-awards.

Wilson has not had quite the publicity of Harry Potter's creator, but the numbers speak for themselves: around seven million of her books have sold worldwide (50,000 copies sell each month), and that's before she's made much of an inroad in the American market. And in prizes, she's won just about everything there is to win in Britain, from the Smarties to the Children's Book Award and many others.

But perhaps the best gauge is the queues of excited children who wait, for hours sometimes, for her to sign their books. During her recent visit to Auckland she spent two-and-a-half hours of solid signing at one shopping centre, but in larger places it's nothing for her to sit there for five or six hours, always smiling, even when she's desperate to go to the loo.

She simply won't leave while there's still a child standing there and, even more amazingly, still replies personally to every letter she receives from her small fans. No mean feat when you consider she's expecting a pile of 500 letters to be waiting for her when she returns home to her London terrace house after this trip.

Wilson's trademark, in titles such as The Suitcase Kid, The Illustrated Mum, Dustbin Baby, Vicky Angel and The Story of Tracy Deaker, is stories that reflect the real-life, difficult experiences that children must somehow survive.

Sadly, of course, there is no shortage of subject matter for such tales, and reiterating the themes sounds like a litany of contemporary social woes: divorce and its forcing of children to go between two homes; mental illness; abandoned children who have terrible problems finding an identity and feeling loved; children whose parents treat them badly; children who have had a close friend die.

Yet Wilson takes each grim subject and deals with it gently, humorously, respectfully - and her fans love her for it.

There are no wizards or magic wands in her stories (although there is the occasional ghost); instead the magic comes from life itself, so that her books are that unusual combination of gritty realism and optimism.

She was in New Zealand to promote her three latest books. Sleepovers and The Cat Mummy are out in paperback (Young Corgi, $14.95 each), while Secrets (Doubleday, $36.95) is brand new. It's classic Wilson: Treasure is terrified she'll be sent back to live with her mother and her abusive boyfriend, so she gets a friend to hide her, Anne Frank-style. As usual, it is a right-royal feast of social realism with a rich complexity of characters and situations, and a big lump in the throat waiting on the last page.