What we know about Picture Imperfect
Few children’s authors circle back to their readers as they age. Jacqueline Wilson is doing exactly that. Her next book, Picture Imperfect, lands on August 28, 2025, and it isn’t just a new release—it’s a return. The novel is an adult sequel to her acclaimed 1999 story The Illustrated Mum, picking up the thread of a family that stayed with readers long after the final page.
Wilson explained the move in a chat with BBC Radio 2’s Scott Mills, laying out the split-screen of her writing life. “There are two of me, actually, the one that writes the children's books – and I love writing children's books, still going to – but it's been so exciting in the last year, I revisited three teenage girls that I'd written about in the 1990s and now, God help them, they're pushing 40.” That instinct—to check back in on characters her audience grew up with—now carries over to Dolphin and Star from The Illustrated Mum.
In the original, Wilson told the story of a mother living with bipolar disorder and her two daughters, Dolphin and Star—named after the flash tattoos their mum adored. It was a tender, complicated portrait of love in a chaotic home, and it treated mental health with a honesty that was rare in children’s fiction at the time. The tattoos were more than decoration; they were armour, memory, identity—inked stories kids could read even if the adults in their lives couldn’t say the quiet parts out loud.
Picture Imperfect shifts the focus to adulthood, with Dolphin now 33—the same age her mother was in the first book. That detail isn’t just a neat symmetry. It sets up the big question Wilson loves to ask: how much of who we become is shaped by the homes we grew up in? Readers who met Dolphin as a child will find her standing at the same crossroads her mother faced, weighing work, love, responsibility, and the old patterns that tug when life gets hard.
This is Wilson’s second foray into adult fiction after 2024’s Think Again, which reunited fans with Ellie, Magda, and Nadine from her Girls series—now navigating their forties with the same mix of candour and warmth that made them cult favourites as teens. Think Again tapped into the reality of midlife friendship: how it stretches, how it breaks, how it reknits itself after shocks. That book proved Wilson could keep her voice—empathetic, unflinching, funny—while writing for readers who now pay mortgages and care for aging parents.
Picture Imperfect follows the same philosophy. Expect emotional stakes that feel familiar to anyone who grew up with Wilson’s books—found family, loyalty under pressure, the tug-of-war between independence and obligation—but grounded in adult realities. If The Illustrated Mum asked how children carry their parents’ storms, the sequel is poised to ask how adults make peace with those storms while building lives of their own.
The announcement wasn’t a dry press line either. Wilson unveiled a statue of herself covered in tattoos, a playful and pointed nod to the iconography of The Illustrated Mum. It’s a wink to readers who remember exactly why those tattoos mattered and a promise that the sequel isn’t shying away from the messier, more vivid parts of that story.
Transworld will publish the book in hardback, audio, and e-book. That multi-format rollout fits the audience Wilson is speaking to: people who discovered her in classrooms and school libraries and now read on commutes, late at night on tablets, or through headphones while juggling busy days.
- Title: Picture Imperfect
- Series link: Adult sequel to The Illustrated Mum (1999)
- Main character: Dolphin, now 33
- Author’s previous adult novel: Think Again (2024)
- Publisher: Transworld
- Formats: Hardback, audio, e-book
- Release date: August 28, 2025
Why this sequel matters to a generation
There’s a reason this announcement hit a nerve with readers who grew up in the early 2000s. Wilson didn’t just sell books—she helped shape how British children’s fiction talked about real life. Divorce, money stress, mental health, social care—she tackled them without turning them into lessons. Her characters felt like classmates, sisters, neighbours. As those readers aged, the longing to see what happened next never quite went away.
Adult sequels sit in a tricky place. They have to honour the spirit of the original without just repeating it grown-up. With The Illustrated Mum, the tightrope is even thinner, because the first book’s power came from a child’s perspective on a parent’s instability. Shift the lens to Dolphin as an adult, and the questions change. How do you build boundaries after a childhood without many? Can you respect a parent’s illness while refusing to relive their chaos? Do old names and old tattoos still mean what they used to?
Wilson has been here in spirit before. Across her career—including series like The Story of Tracy Beaker—she’s shown how institutions, families, and friendships shape a child’s sense of self. Now she’s turning that long view on adulthood. The tone will likely stay familiar: empathetic, brisk, funny at the edges, and willing to sit with discomfort. The difference is the canvas—jobs, relationships, caretaking, finances, and the gnawing thought that you’ve hit the same age your mum was when everything went wrong.
This move also fits a bigger publishing trend: authors returning to characters alongside their readers. The pitch isn’t nostalgia for its own sake; it’s continuity. Life didn’t stop for Dolphin and Star just because the book ended. Checking back in respects the fact that readers didn’t stop either. They grew up. They remember scenes and lines and feelings. They want to compare notes with their younger selves.
Wilson knows her audience well because she stuck with them for decades. She served as the UK Children’s Laureate in the mid-2000s and built a backlist that teachers and librarians still lean on when they need stories that start conversations. The shift to adult fiction isn’t a departure so much as a widening lens. The same empathy and curiosity are there; the stakes are simply older.
If you’re the reader who once smuggled The Illustrated Mum into a school bag and read it under the desk, Picture Imperfect is aimed squarely at you. It isn’t asking you to relive childhood. It’s offering a mirror for the person you became—and a chance to see how Dolphin coped with the very questions you now ask yourself.
Wilson’s on-air comment about living as “two” writers—one for children, one for adults—sounds less like a split and more like a bridge. The bridge runs both ways. Adult readers bring context to scenes they only half-understood as kids. New readers who start here may go back to the original and spot early tremors they missed before. Either way, the story has room to breathe across decades, which is the quiet magic of a well-timed sequel.
So what’s left to learn? The cover art, the audio casting, the first excerpt—all still to come. But the core is set. Picture Imperfect will revisit a family readers never stopped thinking about, and it will do it at the precise moment the parallels bite hardest: when a daughter reaches her mother’s age and decides what to repeat, what to reclaim, and what to leave behind.
