A chance encounter with two American girls and their newly christened London taxi, ‘Gertrude’, starts Jackie on an unexpected road-trip across Europe during which she meets new friends, learns the finer points of hitch-hiking ‘etiquette’, unknowingly takes LSD, fixes numerous cars, falls in love and, finally, finds a sense of contentment and self-awareness.

The story is lively, and Jackie is an engaging first-person narrator who combines naïveté with practicality and a refreshingly dry Australian sense of humour. Sugar Sugar is a finely detailed Young Adult novel full of adventures, misadventures, travel, cars, friendship and fashion (and the almost obligatory sex, drugs and rock’n’roll). Wilkinson skilfully evokes the heady disorientating freedom of the road and the unexpected detours, potentially dangerous situations and eccentric characters that may be encountered along the way.

Sugar Sugar has its weak points, and it seems unlikely that the target readership will understand all the cultural short-hand represented by Wilkinson’s roll-call of 1970s touchstones, but this is unlikely to greatly hinder their enjoyment of this road-trip tale of adolescence in all its hopeful uncertainty.