This Birmingham student wrote her dissertation on Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘traumatic’ novels

Sophie Bjelobaba decided to study her genre after becoming ‘hooked’ on her books

A final year English student at the University of Birmingham has written her dissertation on the works of Jacquline Wilson.

21-year-old Sophie Bjelobaba has been an avid Wilson reader since youth, attributing the beginning of her love for Wilson’s books to a sleepover.

She told The Tab Birmingham how she became obsessed with the author after a friend gave her the book Sleepovers, and how she “ended up reading every single Jacqueline Wilson book to date.”

The dissertation is an examination and analysis of Wilson’s works and is titled: “An insight into Jacqueline Wilson’s Traumatic genre: Dysfunctional families, Coping mechanisms, and happy endings.”

Sophie said: “When I went to one of my first sleepovers I got given Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Sleepovers’ book and from then on I was hooked.”

When listing her favorite Wilson books she said that The “Hetty Feather series, The Longest Whale Song or the sleepover” were all contenders for the top spot.

Sophie drew inspiration for her dissertation from several sources. She cites recent TikTok’s discussing Wilson’s books that uncovered “how dark they actually were.” It made her think how children were allowed to read “such traumatic content!” As a result, this is what inspired the dissertation topic.

Sharing another inspiration for her dissertation, Sophie explained how her family dynamics came into play. She said: “Experiencing my parent’s divorce and realising no child has a normal childhood, it made me want to analyse the traumatic nature of Jacqueline Wilson’s books further.”

Her work questions the happy endings in Wilson’s books given the tough experiences that her young protagonists face. It also highlights the significance of the role parents play in children’s lives, and the way Wilson shows how “this greatly affects children”

Outlining the key insights of her piece, she added: “The way every book follows a pretty much similar structure, and how the majority of the books illustrate the main coping mechanism on the front cover.”

Completing the final year 9,802 word dissertation was not without its challenges however. She shared that an obstacle in completing the dissertation was the lack of evidence.

When trying to construct a point about the characters and trauma she shared that “there were hardly any online resources that addressed this, so I had to look at actual cases of children affected psychologically after grief.”

She added that the reception to her dissertation was warm; “I had a lot of people really liking my topic.” And “it was like a full circle moment, as they knew how much I liked reading JW when I was younger.”

Responding to whether she reached out to Jacqueline Wilson to read it, Sophie said: “Funnily enough my dad suggested I do! I was going to do it last night! She’s always been such an inspiration to myself and I’d love for her to read my dissertation from her.”

Posting about her dissertation on TikTok, Sophie’s video currently stands at 17.7k views and 776 likes. Comments under her post shower her with support with one user writing “that sounds incredible.” And another commenting “would love to read it if you ever post it somewhere.”

Wilson fans will not be waiting for the next series by the author but rather, Sophie Bjelobaba’s public release date for her dissertation!

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Featured image via TikTok @sofieandmeg