Holly’s Space

Love Lessons

Author: Jacqueline Wilson
Illustrator: Nick Sharratt
No. Pages: 272
Publisher: Corgi Children’s
Tags: Drama and Romance

Love Lessons is about a Fourteen year old girl called Prue (Prudence) and her sister Grace. They have been home schooled by their controlling super-strict father almost all their lives. The girls think that they aren’t the same as ‘ordinary’ girls and their attempts to become ‘normal’ were buying nice clothes instead of wearing Mum’s odd hand-made garments, reading teenage magazines etc. When their Dad found out he had a stroke and suddenly got rushed to hospital unable to move or speak properly, the girls mother decides that since she was unable to cope with their education and a sick husband, Prue and Grace get sent to school for the first time in a few years. Grace settled in easily but Prue found it really hard and the only person she can find to talk to is her handsome, young art teacher Mr Raxbury (Rax). Prue and Rax form a friendship over Prue’s art lessons, and soon he asks Prue to baby sit for his little children while he and his wife have a night out on a Friday. This becomes regular and Prue can’t wait for the ten minutes they have alone together as he drives her home. As her feelings for Rax develop, she begins to think that perhaps he feels the same way about her. But he can’t act upon them, can he?

I really enjoyed this book because it kept building-up and didn’t tell you what was going to happen and you couldn’t just guess what was going to happen either. When I got hooked on this book it was actually really hard to put it down, I just wanted to carry on reading it. The good parts about this book are that you start to get interested in it basically straight away and that it shows how strict parents and bullying can affect people. I also think that the first sentence ‘I hate dad.’ is really good because it makes you wonder about the rest of the story and what’s going to happen next. What I didn’t like was that Prue was sometimes really arrogant and the fact that Prue is in love with a grown man is rather disturbing.

I thought that this book was really magnificent. I gave it a rating of four stars because I thought that it was excellent and in some parts I could really relate to what I was reading. I wouldn’t recommend it for younger readers, it is more written for teenage girls because it is obviously about love and younger children may not want to read about that sort of stuff at their age and neither would most boys. Where as most teenage girls don’t mind.

Overall I thought this book was awesome and I would recommend it to any one who thinks it sounds like a good read or likes that sort of book.