This is the first of four books in the top 100 by Jacqueline Wilson, which goes to show how influential and much loved children's books are! I adored her books when I was younger, particularly The Story of Tracey Beaker and The Bed and Breakfast Star and I read Girls in Love when it first came out when I was about 12.
Having just read The Princess Diaries, it was difficult not to compare the two books, as they are so similar. They both begin a series of teenage novels, and like The Princess Diaries, Girls in Love is a story about Ellie and her two best friends, as they navigate their way through their first boyfriends and the troubles of high school. It also deals with the usual teenage issues; boys, friendship troubles, absent parents - but also more interesting and applicable issues like going clubbing for the first time, drugs, drinking, lying to parents and (shock horror) having sex. These issues are not dealt with so frankly in The Princess Diaries, and I think this is more to do with Wilson being a British author, and therefore dealing with issues more appropriate to British teenage girls, with both a frankness and warmth. As a reader you really like Ellie as a character, as well as her friends, and you want them to make the right choices which I suppose is the moral for the teenage audience.
The narrative was a little weaker than that of The Princess Diaries however, but they were both good and I would recommend them both to young teenage girls.
What strikes me most about these two books however is who exactly voted for them?! Not because I think they don't deserve to be in the top 100, but as these are relatively new novels they would not carry the nostalgic vote of the adult audience which a classic like The Secret Garden might have, and these are not aimed at ages in which a parent would read these books to their child, and I doubt 12 year old girls were voting in the Big Read...so with this in mind its interesting that they appear in the list at all - but I'm glad they do. I certainly enjoyed these more than Salman Rushdie...but maybe that says more about me!
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