Books like Jacqueline Wilson

Addie lives with her erratic mother in a tiny trailer, improvising meals, routines, and hope while longing for an ordinary family life. Like Dolphin, she is resilient without being implausibly invulnerable: she notices every broken promise yet cannot stop loving the person who makes it.

Connor’s warm, unsentimental novel never turns Addie’s mother into a simple villain. Its Schneider Family Book Award reflects the care with which it portrays vulnerability and difference. Anyone moved by Jacqueline Wilson’s balance of neglect, loyalty, humour, and yearning will find this painfully hard to put down.

Candice Phee tells her life from A to Z for a school assignment. Her literal-minded observations and determined schemes are extremely funny, but beneath them lies a family stalled by grief and resentment. Like The Illustrated Mum, the novel lets a distinctive child’s voice illuminate troubles she cannot entirely understand.

Candice’s stubborn belief that people might still be helped gives the book its irresistible momentum. It has Wilson’s gift for placing comedy beside genuine hurt without allowing either to cancel the other; its later film adaptation, H Is for Happiness, captures something of the devotion inspired by this wonderfully unusual heroine.

Conor’s mother is seriously ill, and at night a monster comes to demand something from him. The monster does not offer comforting lessons; instead, it tells unsettling stories about people whose love, anger, courage, and selfishness exist all at once.

That emotional honesty makes the novel a powerful companion to The Illustrated Mum. Conor, like Dolphin, carries feelings children are often told they should not have about a suffering parent. Patrick Ness gives those feelings a mythic force, while Jim Kay’s shadowy illustrations make the book physically unforgettable. The first novel to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal, it earns every bit of that rare distinction.