Just So Stories

Harper Collins Australia

December 2025

• ISBN: 9780008513788
• ISBN 10: 0008513783
• Imprint: Farshore Fiction GB
• RRP: $19.99

If you have followed and shrieked with laughter over Gill Sims’ FB posts Peter and Jane over the years or read her books e.g. the Why Mummy Drinks series , you will know instantly that this book is utterly hilarious. It is pure Gill Sims, with less sweary bits.

Written for the main in diary format this is a fabulous insight, albeit slightly madcap, into an average teen girl’s thoughts and in a clever plot twist encompasses two time frames. This device is pivotal in bringing a mum and daughter’s attitudes towards each other into a closer alignment.

14-year-old Emily is cursed – cursed! I tell you – poor thing. Her phone is broken just as she’s about to be packed off to the wilds of the country, while her mother is at a work course. It’s not that she doesn’t like her (found family) Uncle Tom but it’s the Easter holidays and she had big plans, like making TikTok vids with best friend Poppy and, of course, the almost guaranteed, inevitable, imminent invitation to go out with the swoon-worthy, Toby. None of this is going to happen being stuck with Uncle Tom helping him with his latest home reno project up north in the wilds.

She has no phone and, even though Uncle Tom has struck a bargain with her to pay for the phone repairs in return for her labour, it’s going to take WEEKS for that to happen and, meanwhile, she has to moulder about with no contact to any decent living. It is quite apparent, apart from anything else, that her mother hates her, has no genuine maternal instinct and, very obviously, NO IDEA what it’s like being a 14-year-old.

Faced with servitude that involves lots of sugar soap, sanding and the general mucking in that comes with the restoration of a stately home, she is resorting to two things – her art and, after pouring out her woes to Uncle Tom (and with definite resistance on the part of her mum), reading her mum’s diary from the 80s when Lila herself was a teenager. Obviously, both mother and daughter are completely resistant to this suggestion of Tom’s but when they both agree, and Emily takes her first foray into her mum’s past life, she discovers that the mother she thinks she knows, is really an untold story.

As she gets more and more immersed in her mother’s past, she really does come to a new understanding about her mother, about the angst and uncertainty that comes with being a teen, especially one ‘in love’ and in the process, incidentally, finding out much more about Uncle Tom as well.

This really is very funny but it also will speak to your teens on a very different level as well. It will enable them to make connections, to compare with their own situations, to perhaps develop a different point of view regarding how intolerable, selfish, lacking in understanding, and cruel some parents can be. [Please note, I do not mean to infer that all parent/teen relationships are fraught. I’ve experienced both the heinous and the perfectly blissful but it is, in fact, quite common for teens to feel misunderstood by their parentals. Also – sarcasm]

Most of all readers will laugh their way through this whole adventure, and love the retro throwbacks to the heady days of the 80s, and if, at the same time, a little more reflection occurs that can only be a good thing. I’m giving it a very gleeful 5 🪩📱🪩🕺🪩for readers from around Year 6 upwards. Also do yourself a favour check out Gill’s newish substack as well Border Terriers and Breakdowns –we can all use some light relief in these grim times.