Love and Muddy Puddles

Love and Muddy Puddles, Cecily Anne Paterson

After enjoying Invisible and Invincible, and knowing that Miss 12/13 had also enjoyed them, I turned to Paterson’s two novels about twins Coco and Charlie Franks. Love and Muddy Puddles focusses on Coco, in Year 8 at an exclusive girls’ school in Sydney, where she is perfectly happy having finally made it into the popular group at school. But her Dad has taken a redundancy after years of high stress work and decided the family is going for a full tree change and moving to the Kangaroo Valley, to build their own home. Twin sister Charlie and older brother Josh are thrilled, but Coco is horrified. Such a move will be social suicide, why would she possibly want to move away from friends and the city? Refusing to talk to her father, she begrudgingly goes with them, hanging out for the promise of the chance to return to boarding school in a year. She’s pretty badly behaved and has no real idea of just how rude and condescending she can be. Not surprisingly, country life is a bit of a shock at first, but along the way Coco figures out what real friends can be like, how much she loves horse-riding, and that her family might not be so bad after all.

Charlie Franks is A-OK charts Charlie’s exploits the following year, in a new school in the Valley. She has taken up show jumping, and her usual competitive nature might just be causing some problems with the girls at school. Not only that, but things at home are all out of kilter with her mum not being well. Again, Charlie learns what matters with family and friends, and has to rise to a challenge when really needed.

As with the other books of Paterson’s these two also have some reasonably intense storylines. I was somewhat surprised by the intensity of the bullying in Love and Muddy Puddles (as with the Jazmine books) and one creepy boy and his behaviour. I did love the bullies’ names though in the popular group: Saffron and Tiger Lily. I felt it was a shame that none of the friends seemed to grow or change in a positive way, except the main characters. I would have liked to see some of the mean girls come to some realisation of what they were like, and consider change, but I understand they were backdrops to the main character. Miss 14 and I have talked about them and think that while they are well-written, descriptive and evoke heartfelt emotion at points, both the bullying and the early love infatuations were a bit over the top.