Tracey Beaker

The Story of Tracey Beaker used to be my favorite tv series when I was younger. The witty Tracey, who seemed like a really tough girl but actually was really insecure about herself and the rest of the gang on the dumping grounds.

I really liked that the book and the series are somewhat similar. The pictures that were used in the book are also used in the series.

The book is very visually attractive, and I think this would be a great book for kids who are easily distracted. This is because the pictures but also because of the lay out in the rest of the text. The way that letters to and from Tracy are in a different format as the rest of the text. You notice this when you first open up the book. It starts off with a chapter about herself, which looks like it has come from a journal or something. Later on we notice3 that it actually is a journal. The first chapter is a great way to introduce Tracey to the readers, so they can get a clear picture about her before they dive headfirst into the story.

Once the first chapter begins, I noticed it immediately kept up a steady pace, and there were hardly times I felt the story was lacking pace. This makes it quite an enjoyable book for young readers, because it is very difficult to get bored with a book like this one.

This lesson was about identity crisis. I think Tracey has an identity crisis and because of it tries to hide the fact that she is really insecure. If she pretends to be this tough as nails kids, then nobody can hurt her. Or nobody dares to try. I think she is even fooling herself, because she writes about it in her own journal. She pretends her mother is some sort of amazing super star, who will come and sweep her away from the miserable foster house to enjoy the rest of their life together. As a reader we know that the chance that this will happen is next to zero. But when she meets Cam, a scrubby writer, she is nothing like the fabulous mother Tracey always envisioned. But in the end she does turn out to be the best foster mother for Tracey, and even she is starting to realize that. You can see she has matured over the duration of the book, because when she is bidding her farewells to the other foster kids she shows them how much she has grown (slice of her own birthday cake for Peter, her Mickey Mouse pen for Justine, who used to be her arch nemesis).

I think this book is suitable for the younger readers, up to an age of 12 years old. Though I have to say I quite enjoyed reading the book myself.  This is obviously because I have watched the series and I was delighted to find that the series (at least the first 13 episodes) follow the books course.