The Bed and Breakfast Star by Jacqueline Wilson

This book is about Elsa, a young, optimistic girl. She lived with her mother in a flat and went to school.

When she grew up her mother met "Mack the smack" and got married. Her situations changed when Mack kept losing his jobs and Pippa, her half-sister, was born. They had to move from a good flat to a damp mouldy one. After spending a year or so there, Mack gets a good job and they buy a house. She thinks that her life will stay this way but she is wrong.

Mack loses his job and they have to shift to Scotland and live with Mack's mother. Then her mother can't stand living with Mack's mother and leaves when her half brother, Hank, is born. They end up in a rundown bed and breakfast hotel with bugs and insects in a family room but Elsa stays happy and makes the best of the worst.

She tries cheering her mother by telling her jokes but it doesn't work. Yet Else never loses hope and her dream of being a comedian stays with her. Even though her rough days, Elsa wouldn't stop caring for her stepsister, Pippa or her stepbrother, Hank. That shows Elsa was very family oriented. But she never got around to liking Max that shows she wasn't used to having big changes in her life but had learnt to adapt to having to move from place to place.