When The Illustrated Mum was first published, Wilson was warned that a particular scene – where Marigold covers herself in toxic white paint to hide her tattoos – might be “too stark” for children.<\/p>\n
“I was told it was scary, maybe too much,” Wilson recalls. “But I thought, no, that moment was what would push Dolphin to finally get help. It had to be there and luckily, I got my way.”<\/p>\n
Wilson insists she has no regrets about the tougher themes in her books, despite occasional criticism that she was going too far. <\/p>\n
What makes her laugh, though, is remembering a complaint from a furious mum who accused her of ruining her daughter’s childhood because one of her books implied that 11-year-olds no longer believe in Father Christmas. <\/p>\n
“You can’t please everyone,” Wilson chuckles.<\/p>\n
Yet, for all her boundary-pushing, she is clear about where she draws the line. <\/p>\n
She acknowledges young people now are exposed to far more than readers were in the 1990s or 2000s, with conversations about misogyny, online abuse and even incel culture filtering down into classrooms.<\/p>\n
But she says those darker realities belong in her adult fiction rather than her children’s books.<\/p>\n
“If I were to put something as troubling as the whole incel thing into a children’s book, it would only ever be implied,” she explains. “With adult books, you can more or less write what you want. With children, you have to balance being honest without overwhelming them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When The Illustrated Mum was first published, Wilson was warned that a particular scene – where Marigold covers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-97517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}