Repetitive, and while this is supposed to be a children's book, I would not have read it with my children. Simplistic, unfocused, and at times, cringeworthy. ( )

I really enjoyed this, which is a solidly typical Jacqueline Wilson. Ella's mum has remarried, and is having a baby with her step-dad, who Ella generally resents for messing up the shape of her life. But then her mum ends up gravely ill in a coma after having the baby and Ella and her step-dad have to learn to support each other while looking after the baby.

It captures some of the rawness of grief perfectly, when someone is trying so hard to be nice to you, and you're just angry and hurt and everything is _wrong_ and you're horrid back to them.

There's a lot of very Jacqueline Wilson-esque subplots - Ella's biological dad turns up for a chapter, and is ridiculously rubbish, Ella discovers that the nasty girl at school is nasty because she's got an abusive step-dad and a mum who is horrid to her, Ella finds out that when her best friend makes a new friend, she can make a new friend too, even if they're a boy!

I have to say, the thing I didn't like most about this book was the happy ending. The rest of it is really well crafted, the grief, the denial, trying to stay optimistic while the bad news comes in the cracks. I'm not saying I wanted Ella's mum to die, or to have to live in a PVS . But it felt like the strength of the story was showing how Ella manages to become closer to her step dad and brother, and get enthusiastic about her whale project, and make new friends, even though this terrible thing has happened. Tacking on a happy ending felt almost like it undermined all that. And it felt _so_ tacked on! It all happens on literally the last page, and feels very cliched and saccharine. I find myself wondering if Jacqueline Wilson had written the (in my opinion) more powerful ambiguous ending, where Ella is still sitting at her mum's bedside talking to her in her coma, and then got lent on with 'it's for kids, don't be so ridiculously bleak, of course her mum wakes up at the end' and tacked on the ending but her heart wasn't in it. ( )