PINK BOOKS:

Meg Cabot, How to Be Popular, Macmillan, 11+
Hilary McKay, Caddy Ever After, Hodder 11+
Louise Rennsion, Luurve is a Many-Trousered Thing HarperCollins 12+
Sue Limb, Girl 15, Flirting For England/ Zoe & Chloe on the Prowl, Bloomsbury 11+

For those of us struggling with a month of exams, and hysterical daughters, the arrival of junior rom-com comes as a huge relief.  

All, I suspect, are descendents of Jean Webb’s epistolary novel, Dear Daddy Long-Legs, a rather creepy comedy about a girl who falls in love with a much older man, but the genre really took off with Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries. Little girls of 8+ love these, and all her other books, from the All-American Girl series to the most recent, How To Be Popular, follow in the same chirpy, wholesome vein. The plot is always the same: Nice (Bookish) Girl stands up to Mean Girls, gets makeover and wins Hot Guy. Steph has been hated ever since she spilt a red drink over the white D&G skirt of the It girl of her high school. Rescued by an ancient book called How To Be Popular, she goes about vanquishing ill-will with fairly creditable ingenuity. There are some clever minor characters, including that of Darlene, a pretty girl who pretends to be stupid in order to be popular, but the formula is getting tired and rather patronising.

Hilary McKay’s Casson Family series got off to a splendid start with Saffy’s Angel, in which an adopted girl in a bohemian family of four children ran away from home to Italy. Naming children after colours is tiresome, but McKay shows us a kind of updated version of E. Nesbit’s Bastables, a portrait of middle-class family life which is charming, funny and wise. Caddy Ever After suffers from being told from the point of view of the youngest sister, Rose, but Caddy is getting married, and her brother Indigo is trying to play Cupid for a Valentine’s Day disco, his girlfriend Sarah is scarily sick and Saffy has a weird boyfriend. The series is better-written than its pink covers suggest.

After a ferocious struggle not to succumb to titles such as Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison’s books have conquered me. Her latest, Luuurve is a Many-Trousered Thing continues the romantic misadventures of Georgia as she juggles three boys, including Massimo the Italian Stallion. Written as a ranting diary, you can tell the author is a stand-up comedienne as well as a best-selling author, but what is better than Bridget Jones is her linguistic inventions – breasts are “nunga-nungas”, a welk boy is a bad kisser and an over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder is a bra. Vulgar, vital and vair funny, it’s guaranteed to give adults a nervy b.

A favourite writer of rom-coms for teens is Sue Limb. Her heroine, Jess, first appeared three years ago in Girl, 15, Charming But Insane, and we followed through her misadventures as a would-be comedienne at school and home. Limb’s heroine is cleverer that Rennison’s, less bonkers than McKay’s but just as captivating. A kind of prequel, Flirting for England, shows her to us on a French exchange, a couple of years before she finally gets it together with her soul-mate Fred. For those who can’t get enough of her world, there is also Zoe and Chloe on the Prowl about two best friends at Jess’s school, trying to Pygmalion a pair of hopeless boys before a charity ball. The obsessions, embarrassments, disasters and joys of young teen life are captured with pitch-perfect comic timing.

Boys are supposed to stick to manly adventures by Higson, Muchamore and Horowitz but have hearts – and sit exams - too. It would be good if there were more to cheer them up, because while my daughter squirrels these away and rocks with laughter my poor son is left with Tintin.