The Other Edie Trimmer by Jacqueline Wilson is the story of modern girl Edie who loves acting and desperately wants to win the role of Oliver in a local play. She feels she’s ready for the role but when it goes to her shy best friend Alex and Edie has to spend her summer alone she decides acting might not be the road for her.
It’s a lonely summer for Edie. A trip to Peter and Gordon’s antique shop is just what she needs to cheer her up. There she finds an old book from a Victorian workhouse which has been water damaged. Peter and Gordon let her have it for free so that she can write a story about a workhouse girl. Only when she goes to write the first line she finds that another Edie Trimmer has already written her name in the book. Who is this other Edie Trimmer and how did she end up in the workhouse?
Current day Edie finds her room shifting sideways and being pulled into Victorian London. Edie is a bright girl and remarkably well informed about the Victorian era from her time reading Oliver and studying the Victorians at school but she hadn’t appreciated quite how bad things were at that period in time. Particularly for children.
This book is a fun read. Very informative and eye opening on what it might have been like practically to be a child in this time. Wilson does not gloss over some of the harsher realities as tends to happen in stories from this age for children. Conditions were poor, particularly in a workhouse and this book doesn’t shy away from showing it.
This book has some great characters in it. Both horrible ones from missus who works Edie very hard to the staff at the workhouse and also the lovely characters that she meets along the way. Algie, a kind boy who looks out for Edie plays a prominent role in the more positive aspects of Edie’s story.
I would advise that for anyone reading this review with children in mind that it’s not for young children. The story can be a little scary in places for little children as Edie is fairly often in some form of peril or living somewhere desperate. Totally fine for older children though. I also enjoyed reading it as an adult. Not my favourite Jacqueline Wilson book but I did enjoy reading it. I’m not generally a fan of stories that use time travel in their premise but this did actually work pretty well and I don’t mind a bit of creative license to explore the time period through modern eyes. It’s cleverly done.
I did wonder how there could possibly be a happy ending for this book. At times things looked rather bleak for Edie. I will say little about the details of the ending so as not to spoil the book but the end was far more rose tinted than the rest of the book. Unlikely would be the word I would choose for it. Extremely unlikely. But it is also a children’s book where anything is possible. Not the end you would probably expect for the section set in Victorian England.
A fun book to read, especially for children interested in history and in particular with an interest in the Victorians. This is a lovely story about a girl’s chances of survival in this time period and how hard it was to be in the world by yourself in that time when the alternative was the bleak existence of the workhouse. A stark contract to Wilson’s other stories containing a child with missing parents like the hugely popular Tracey Beaker. I certainly came away with a sense of gratitude to be living now and not in the past.
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