SuitabookOpal Plumstead
Jacqueline Wilson
- Reading
- Consider reading alongside discussion of historical context, pausing after the family crisis and wartime turn. Check in around bullying, bereavement and romance, and allow space to talk rather than rushing onwards.
- Themes
- Education, work and class: Opal gives up her educational plans when her father is imprisoned and works in a sweets factory to support her family. The situation is presented as a serious constraint on a clever girl's ambitions, while her abilities and later artistic direction remain important.
- Women’s rights and political action: Opal is introduced to suffragettes through the factory owner and becomes a suffragette herself. The narrative clearly gives political significance to women campaigning for rights and presents Opal’s involvement as part of her development.
- War and personal loss: The First World War emerges at the end of the story and disrupts Opal’s relationship and wider life; Morgan is reported to die fighting. War is framed through destruction and tragic impact on lives rather than as an uncomplicated adventure or achievement.
- Worth knowing
- Expect emotionally weighty material: a parent’s imprisonment, poverty, bullying at work, leaving school, romantic loss and the outbreak of war.