My Brother Bernadette Book

This book is part of the 'Yellow Banana' series put out by Heineman Young, which are short chapter books for semi-fluent readers. I'd been looking for something like this because my six-year-old responds very well to text with high quality, coloured pictures, and although she has quite liked chapter books such as Violet Mackerel and similar, those are not expensive productions; the illustrations are simple line drawings. While line drawings can be quite wonderful and expressive, the illustrations in this book are of the highest quality, and really held her attention. She doesn't usually ask for an entire chapter book in one sitting, but she wouldn't let me finish until I'd finished and then she saw that there are others in the series and asked for those too. (I don't have them, but may seek them out.)

The illustrations by David Roberts are so wonderful, of course, in part because of the author pairing. Jacqueline Wilson really knows how to write for kids -- not just the slightly older age group, as it happens, but for six year old girls as well.

I love that this is a story about a working class family. We so often read about middle class kids, and although we're never told as much, it's generally obvious from the holidays they are taken on and the items around their houses. These are British kids whose parents both need to work, which means the kids need to go to holiday programs when school's not in.

A lesser writer might get some cheap conflict out of some relationship difficulties between the children and the adults who run the program, but at every stage in this story I realised that the adults are caring and well-meaning -- they just didn't fully understand the social dynamics going on between the kids.

The character of Big Dan is a classic bully trope and young readers will recognise this immediately. While this story doesn't push any boundaries regarding the subtle complexities of real-life bullies (who are often victims themselves, and who do not fit into a victim-bully binary), the real character complexity is saved for Sara's little brother Bernard.

Without being told as much, the reader will know from his treatment that this is a gentle, perhaps effeminate little boy, and now he faces a new set of peers and must learn how to both stand up to the bullies and how to be himself. He manages this with grace. Wilson's complexity of character comes from the fact that although Bernard likes traditionally girly things such as sewing, he doesn't go straight for the daisies, and the frills and the most camp fabrics -- he may like sewing, but he's going to embroider a dragon, dammit.

This story is a good starting point for a discussion about boys doing girly things and girls doing boyish things, and is there really any such thing. It's also a good depiction of the way in which it's okay for a girl (Sara) to defy gender expectations by playing football, but when the little brother defies gender expectations he is called names. (Because girls have less power, it's still not okay for a boy to identify at all with girls.)

Although this is basically a retribution story in which a bully gets his come-uppance -- I'm not a fan of this kind of tale -- the 'comeuppance' is innocuous: Big Dan is simply forced to face his own discomfort with non-traditional gender markers.