ukki 's review for:

Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson

2.0

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I picked up my first Jacqueline Wilson from a little mobile library when I was 7 years old and it messed me up beyond belief, which is why it's so disappointing how underwhelming this book is. Even accounting for the possibility of me being less impressionable than I used to be, it is a very defanged book for an author known for delving into the messier aspects of life and then committing them to paper in terms suitable for young children to understand.

So, the plot is not great. I am usually very forgiving of lackluster plots, as long as I am given compelling characters to make up for them. Which should have been a piece of cake for this particular book, seeing as the whole reason for its existence is that people loved the original cast so much they clamored to have them back for almost three decades. But even there it fails to deliver. Everyone just feels very one-dimensional. Spoilers below.

So, Ellie is Ellie. She's a little pathetic and that's kind of always been her thing. Except this time it feels pretty mean-spirited. Ellie still doesn't like herself, she doesn't have a fulfilling social life, she lives in a place she is ashamed of more often than not. And by the end of the book, none of those things have changed, except now she's got a girlfriend (a girlfriend whom we are repeatedly told is slimmer and fitter and prettier than her. I wish JW had taken the chance to explore how envy often fits into same-sex relationships. I wanna fuck the ones I envy, thank you Lil Nas X).

Magda and Nadine are barely there. I don't have much to say about either of their arcs because the arcs themselves feature so minimally, but I don't like how the story straight-up tells us that Nadine's problem is that she engages in kink full-stop as opposed to the fact that she engages in kink unsafely while intoxicated with partners who are also intoxicated and also don't know what they're doing. JW has never heard of risk-aware kink.

It looks like we might be getting a sequel to this sequel, so there may yet be hope for Lottie, but as things stand now, Lottie is less of a character than she is an ideal. Lottie is the chillest person to have ever chilled. How lucky for Ellie that she happened to birth a daughter so self-assured that she never had to second-guess, for instance, her relationship with her own body image and how she might transmit these complexes upon her child!

Alice suffers from very much the same problem. She is hot, she shares all of Ellie's passions, and even Ellie's grumpy cat instantly likes her. Her only defect seems to be that she can't cook an omelette. This could have been a cute little commentary on how when you're in love you see every little quirk through rose-tinted glasses, but I daren't hope.

Guy needn't have existed in this book as his presence as it is adds nothing of value, besides informing us that JW believes men fall into one of two categories — insufferable, and gay. I do think it somewhat cheapens Ellie and Alice's relationship that both of them just so happened to fall into each other's arms after dating people who were objectively awful in every single way. Especially when it comes to Ellie's discovery of her sexuality, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that the book ends up framing being sapphic as being less about loving women, and more about not liking men instead.

So yeah. Not a big fan of this one.