Jacqueline Wilson - Spellbinding tales without wizards

By MARGIE THOMSON

For many children, one particular book or author is the catalyst for enthusiastic, independent reading.

That has been the great thing about the Harry Potter phenomenon: J.K. Rowling's schoolboy wizard has cast reading magic over so many previously television-bound children.

Harry Potter is not for everyone, of course, and my 8-year-old was one who just couldn't get into those bestsellers. The author who has entranced my child is the far earthier Jacqueline Wilson. My daughter has polished off Double Act, Bad Girls, The Suitcase Kid and now The Dare Game.

Waiting for her is Wilson's latest, The Illustrated Mum (Corgi, $14.95), which in Britain has just won the 2000 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

Told in the first-person, in a convincing child's voice, this is the story of Dolphin, the younger daughter of Marigold, a much-tattooed manic-depressive.

How Dol and her half-sister, Star, cope with looking after the declining Marigold sounds like a grim subject, but many children have told Wilson it's their favourite.

Even with such a potentially dark, sad subject, Wilson is never grim.

She knows she faces a generation of children for whom a love of reading cannot be taken for granted.

"Children have so many things fighting for their attention and they're used to channel-hopping," she says.

"It's a much more speedy way of life and they're much less likely to persevere if something is boring or slow-moving."

For many, conventional families have been replaced by more complex structures, and books need to reflect this if they are to attract children.

So Wilson, whose own childhood "was not a particularly benign and happy one," looks for her subject matter in the lives of children themselves. Thus we read of Andy, the "suitcase kid," who goes between her mother's and her father's houses, adapting to two very different ways of doing things while never quite accepting the unreality of her nostalgic view of her parents' former life together.

Then there's Tracy Beaker, the main character in The Story of Tracy Beaker and The Dare Game, left in a children's home by her mother, then fostered by Cal. Tracy is an exasperating outsider, but her tremendous hope and wild energy mean you cannot help wanting the best for her.

"I don't provide solutions," Wilson says, "but the books can be really helpful because it makes life a lot less lonely if children realise they are not the only ones in these predicaments."

Of the 200 letters she receives - and answers - every week from her young fans, most are from children from "perfectly cozy backgrounds," so you don't have to be an outsider to enjoy these stories.

But, Wilson says, "It's a huge added bonus to get letters from kids who have felt truly helped by these books - if I get letters, for instance, from kids whose parents have split up, or who have some sort of trouble going on at home, and the kids just want to tell me about it.

"I try to deal truthfully, but at the same time I don't want to make children desperately depressed, so there are always lots of funny bits to break the tension. And I try very hard to have an upbeat ending. I would hate children to feel despairing. I do want to entertain and to reassure."

Wilson's main aim is not necessarily to "do good" around social issues. If she does, she says, it's a side-effect of the fact that she is a compulsive writer with a burning drive to "turn children onto the idea that reading books is an exciting thing to do."

There is something perennially youthful about Wilson. Despite her 54 years, children often home in on her active inner-child, asking her questions about her pets, for instance, or what time she is allowed to stay up to at night.

"Because I write as a child they treat me as a grown-up child," Wilson says. "It makes me feel extremely special. What's delightful for me is that because my books have become very popular they treat me like a rock star. At signings and readings I can hear these little kids saying, 'I've touched her!'"

In the swinging 60s, aged 17, Wilson left London to take a job on teen magazine Jackie in Scotland.

As a child she had filled countless exercise books with her writing. In her teens and early 20s she churned out three novels before publishing her first children's book as part of the Nippers learning-to-read series aimed at inner-city kids "for whom the whole Peter and Jane world just wouldn't work."

Back in London and with a young daughter, Wilson produced a series of five adult crime novels, but knew that writing for children was what she wanted to do.

She wrote well-reviewed novels for teenagers but she was still not satisfied with the direction she was taking.

"I felt that the average, not-keen-to-read young person was not going to be turned on by them. I thought that it must be possible to write a story that was complex but would suck the reader straight in. I also thought it would be wonderful to include illustrations to break up the text and make it immediately more appealing."

Ten years ago this proved a winning idea. One of her former editors moved to Transworld and invited her to write for him. She came up with The Story of Tracy Beaker, aimed at the 8-to-11 market for which she has mostly written since, and began her partnership with illustrator Nick Sharratt, whose line drawings and snazzy covers bring "immense child appeal."

In the past 10 years Wilson has won many awards, including the 1995 Smarties Award and the 1996 Children's Book Award. In 1997 she was the only living author to make the top 10 of the BBC Bookworm/Waterstone's poll of the nation's favourite children's books.

More than three million copies of her books have sold in Britain, and she is a top-selling children's author here as well.

But for Wilson, who spends much of her time meeting her young admirers, running workshops for disadvantaged kids and signing countless copies of her books, all in the cause of reading, the best prize of all is that rich silence that comes when a child is absorbed in one of her books.