Connie Pickles Books in Order

Connie Pickles is a short YA series built around the diary of Constance de Bellechasse, better known as Connie. In the first book she is fourteen, in the second she is fifteen, and everything feels urgent in the way it only does at that age. Boys matter. Bras matter. Best friends matter. So do money worries, family drama, and the fear that everyone else understands life a bit better than you do.

The first book, Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles, drops Connie into a world that feels recognisable and slightly chaotic. She has a widowed French mother she would very much like to sort out, friends who are forever creating new complications, and a crush situation that is never as simple as it should be. A lot of the comedy comes from Connie's confidence that she can fix other people's lives if she just plans hard enough. Usually, of course, that makes the mess bigger.

She is funny, nosy, romantic, and almost always in a little over her head.

That diary voice is really the engine of the series. Connie can be dramatic, self-conscious, bossy, kind, ridiculous, and painfully honest, sometimes all on the same page. Because you are so close to her thoughts, the books can handle both jokes and real feeling at once. Durrant gives her a strong supporting cast too, especially Julie, William, Delilah, and Connie's mother, so the books never feel like one-girl monologues. They feel like a whole teenage social world wobbling around her.

The second book, Bon Voyage, Connie Pickles, opens things out by sending Connie to France on a school exchange. That change of setting matters. France is not just a backdrop for mishaps, bad hair, and awkward host-family moments, though there is plenty of all that. It also connects to Connie's family story, especially her wish to reconnect her mother with estranged grandparents, and to her own idea of who she might become if she were just a little more chic, lucky, or grown-up than she currently is.

Across both books, the stakes are everyday ones, but they feel properly big. Connie worries about love, friendship, belonging, class, appearance, and how families carry old hurts around. The series stays funny, but it never treats those feelings as silly. That is why the books still work so well. They understand that teenage life can be comic and intense at exactly the same time.

If you are coming to the series fresh, start with Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles and then move to Bon Voyage, Connie Pickles. The books are short on fantasy and long on personality. What you get instead is a warm, sharp, very human story about a girl trying to make sense of other people, and slowly learning how to make sense of herself.