The Key to All Baby-Sitterologies: A Vast Work of Meticulous Research

#1 Kristy's Great Idea Kristy comes up with the idea for the Baby-Sitters Club. She recruits Mary Anne, her best friend and next-door neighboor; Claudia, a now-sophisticated childhood friend whom they feel has been growing away from them; and Stacey, Claudia's new friend who just moved from New York City. The club decides on the rules, including regular meetings, offices for each member, and writing up each job in the Club Notebook. Kristy starts the book disliking her mother's boyfriend, the millionaire Watson Brewer, but gradually begins to warm to him after bonding with his young children, Karen and Andrew, on baby-sitting job. Stacey acts odd through the whole book and occasionally tells transparent lies; at the end, it's revealed that she has diabetes, and was afraid her new friends would act differently toward her because she's sick. The friends bond over this shared secret, and their baby-sitting and club-running experiences.

Largely set-up, it's clear that this was intended to be the first in a series. The organizational structure of the club is put in place here, and remains mostly unaltered throughout the series. Kristy is great here: energetic, smart, and sympathetic, even when she's being mean to Watson. Several character subplots (nearly one for each girl, with Kristy's and Stacey's the biggest) round out a short book with a surprising amount of content.

Continuity Oddity: Kristy's mother is referred to as "Edie" here, and "Elizabeth" in future books. (Not necessarily a goof. "Edie" could be short for "Elizabeth," no? But odd that she never uses that nickname again.)

Read as a kid: Yes, many, many times. In fact, I think it's the first one I read, and that I read them largely in order (I was that organized).

Timing: Early September of seventh grade (it's still hot out).

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#2 Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls The babysitters are spooked by news stories of a jewel thief who calls homes and then hangs up without saying anything to make sure no one is there before he comes to rob them, especially after Claudia and Kristy start receiving "phantom phone calls" at their babysitting jobs. Finally, while tag-team babysitting Jamie Newton and his cousins, Claudia and Kristy see prowlers and call the police, only to discover that their stalkers are boys who were too shy to ask them out.

A jewel thief story sets an early precedent for mysteries and seems a slightly odd choice for a second book in a baby-sitting girls series, but it makes sense if you think about it: it's a logical choice to follow September with October and a Halloween story; Claudia, the vice president (the initial stories are told in rank order, it seems), is a Nancy Drew fiend; and the general moral is about safety on the job, not a bad lesson. I'm pleased that the story has a mundane, logical conclusion and that they don't really capture the jewel thief (although it is a little unbelievable that the boy who happened to be stalking Claudia happened to be the boy she had a crush on all along).

Read as a kid: Yes, many times. I have clear memories of reading this while eating chocolate, though I didn't necessary read it at Halloween (I was too young to have read them as they came out).

Timing: October of seventh grade, covering the lead-up to the Halloween dance.

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#3 The Truth About Stacey Not to be confused with The Truth About Jane, the Truth About Stacey is that she has diabetes (which we already knew). Stacey is frustrated when her parents insist on taking her for a time-consuming set of tests with a new, faddish doctor in New York City, just when the club needs her the most. A rival baby-sitting collective, the Babysitting Agency, moves in on the BSC's turf, composed of eighth-graders and high school students, with a laxer structure, a less rigorous vetting process, and--most frustratingly for the Club, and causing the eventual cause of the downfall of the Agency--less emphasis on spending time with and entertaining children. Kristy brainstorms ideas to remain competitive, including Kid-Kits. Stacey realizes how much the club and her new friends mean to her when they're threatened, and she's among the more gung-ho fighters in the battle of the clubs.

Two fairly exciting, suspenseful plots in this one! (Later books probably wouldn't try to cram in so much in one book. Incidentally, both plots show our girls to be more mature and responsible than their elders. (Most of them. Dr. Johanssen proves to be one of the good grown-ups.) One of the central themes of the series seems to be the young heroines' boundless capacity for wisdom and responsibility. I approve, really; they're not perfect, and I like that they set a high standard of normal behavior.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: Late November and early December, including Thanksgiving and leading up to Christmas break.

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#4 Mary Anne Saves the Day The BSC gets into a huge fight, and try to make the club run without friendship (e.g., by taking meeting times in shifts). Mary Anne makes friends with a new girl, Dawn, at first to make Kristy jealous; but she really bonds with Dawn, especially after the girls discover that their parents were high school sweethearts. Jenny Prezzioso gets sick while Mary Anne is caring for her, and Mary Anne calls Dawn for help. After proving to herself that she can be strong in an emergency, Mary Anne takes charge and gets the others to apologize and make up. Dawn joins the club.

This is the first of a handful of BSC vs. BSC stories, and I find it stressful, but not necessarily in a bad way; a long, slow feeling of estrangement is effectively conveyed. This is the first book which focuses on shy Mary Anne and her life of quiet respect and strained affection with her strict father is both charming and somewhat heartbreaking. Too bad her lifetime struggle with proving to her father that she's not a baby is neatly dealt with in this book, never to really return again.

Sign of the Times: Mary Anne is impressed that Dawn's family has a VCR.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: January of seventh grade

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#5 Dawn and the Impossible Three Dawn slips into a motherly (or possibly fatherly) role to a recently divorced family, and finds it difficult to know when or how to keep distance. Meanwhile, she deals with the silent wrath of Kristy, who's jealous that she "stole" Mary Anne.

The main storyline here is one of my favorite babysitting-oriented ones of the series; despite the title, neither the kids nor the mother is villainized, and it's really not clear when Dawn starts taking on too much or what she should do. It's a little too simply dealt with (with a Conversation with Mrs. Barret after which she just improves), but it's decent. If you want to talk about "too easily dealt with," though, marvel as Dawn invites Kristy over after school and bonds with her about halfway through the book, and then their relationship is just fine. (For the most part. There are slight resentments between them throughout the series, but most of the tension just vanishes here apropos of very little.) Dawn is at her most sympathetic ever in this volume; she comes across as funny, friendly, earnest, easygoing, hardworking, and kind, and shows promise for becoming one of the best baby-sitters. She will not be.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: February/March of seventh grade

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#6 Kristy's Big Day In the final week before her mother's wedding wedding, Kristy and the rest of the club hold a 9-to-5 day care for the children of her visiting relatives. Kristy deals with lingering misgivings about her impending life changes, and serves as a bridesmaid in the wedding.

The five-day day care takes up most of the book, and provides an interesting and unusual structure with plenty of baby-sitting content and organizational planning (I love organizational planning!)

Lingering Question: The week of relative-assisted prep work is necessitated when Elizabeth moves the wedding abruptly forward because she has sold the house sooner than expected. Why, exactly, is not an option to move first, and then have the wedding? Is it a moral issue? Really, moving an entire wedding from three months to three weeks in the future is preferable to re-sorting the move/wedding order?

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: Early summer vacation after seventh grade (June)

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#7 Claudia and Mean Janine Amidst BSC plans for an informal neighborhood playgroup, Claudia drops out to deal with a family emergency: her beloved live-in grandmother Mimi has a stroke. Claudia "babysits" Mimi during her slow recovery, and fights with her sister Janine, whom she feels isn't pulling her weight in the family crisis.

Mimi's stroke is frightening and heartrending, and Claudia's thoughts and emotions during the aftermath are complex and realistic (fear, grief, guilt, duty, love, failure, comparing Mimi to a baby, hating herself for comparing Mimi to a baby, etc.) The playgroup storyline is a bit of rehash of book 6, but it's quickly demoted from main plot to backdrop as the hospital visits and Mimi-therapy take over Claudia's life (a touch of realism, really; you're never conveniently between things when an emergency happens). "Mean Janine" is at best a C-plot, but an interesting one. We see good and bad sides of both sisters, and their feelings about their different roles in the family.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: July between seventh and eighth grades

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#8 Boy-Crazy Stacey Stacey and Mary Anne go to the Sea City ocean resort with the Pike family as mother's helpers. Stacey falls in love with a hunky lifeguard, leaving most of the work of baby-sitting to Mary Anne.

We get eight books into a girl-centered series before crushes on boys is a central plotline! (Has this ever happened before? Will it ever happen again?) The lifeguard story is horrible and great, as Scott Foley (not to be confused with Scott Foley) gives Stacey just enough attention to keep her coming back for more, while never really making any real statements. Stacey's recovery from the monster crush is only marred by the tacked-on Nice Boys she and Mary Anne get at the end. Sea City with the Pikes is pretty entertaining.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: July/August between seventh and eighth grades.

Super Special #1: Baby-Sitters On Board Kristy's entire extended family, the Pikes, and all of the Baby-sitters go on a cruise around the Bahamas and a three-day trip to Disney World together. I don't even like to think about how much that cost.

The format of the Super Specials is that each club member, plus several secondary characters such as the baby-sat, get to narrate a handful of chapters spread throughout the book, so that multiple plotlines and viewpoints can be explored. In general, this narrative experimentation produces disappointing results, as none of the storylines are very well-developed or interesting. Additionally, most Super Specials are vacation journals, which in and of themselves are not particularly interesting reading (besides straining credulity more than normal entries in the series do). However, I won't deny that kids like reading about Disneyworld. And Ann M. Martin certainly likes writing about it, as we will come to know.

In this Super Special, Kristy and Dawn get into a fight while sharing a cabin; Claudia has a secret admirer; Mary Anne seems to secretly admire a girl; Stacey befriends a boy in wheelchair on a Make-a-Wish type trip; Karen spends her father's money; Mallory (narrating for the first and only time in the role of baby-sat rather than baby-sitter) decides to take Harriet-the-Spy style notes on everyone; and in what is probably the most entertaining plotline, several of the boys search for buried treasure using a map which turns out to be a Xerox machine blueprint, somehow.

Lingering Question: Watson, I understand, has infinite resources, but where are the Pikes getting the money for this trip?

Read as a kid: I came at the right time to be thoroughly indoctrinated by the series, having graduated from the Little Sister series, so upon closer recollection, this may actually have been the first or among the first that I read, sort of a transitional book which had both older Baby-sitter chapters and Karen chapters. In particular, the scene where Karen gets a purple manicure awakens in me the kind of bone-deep sense-memory that I normally only get reading one of the Little Sister books or watching Rankin/Bass's The Return of the King.

Timing: Summer between seventh and eighth grades.

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#9 The Ghost at Dawn's House Dawn finally finds a secret passage under her house and she quickly becomes convinced that it is haunted when she finds a varying array of old-looking objects there and hears spooky noises at odd times. It turns out that Nicky Pike has discovered how to get into the passage and is using it as his private clubhouse.

This is another one of the "mystery" type stories, and one of the less interesting ones. Dawn is OK here, but it's mostly about her interest in ghosts, which I find fairly dull. The stuff about the history of Stoneybrook and local legends is a snooze. There's very little B plot, just some baby-sitting vignettes (some stuff at the Pikes, with Nicky feeling caught in the middle, and some irrelevant stuff, such as Mary Anne bonding with the Perkins girls who live in Kristy's old house, and Claudia trying get Jamie Newton to go to bed.) Contains a fairly amusing sequence of the Baby-sitters looking for secret passages in Dawn's house and scaring each other silly, and a sort of funny but sort of idiotic part where Dawn and Jeff meet their mother's date, the Trip-man, who meets all their geeky expectations. Mostly, though, it's a waste of a book. I don't understand how so much can happen in some books, and so little in others.

Read as a kid: Yes, but my memory of it is slightly vaguer than that of the other early books. Perhaps I acquired it after a significant gap, or simply recognized its suckitude.

Timing: August between seventh and eighth grades

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#10 Logan Likes Mary Anne! Mary Anne forms an instant crush on the new boy, Logan Bruno, a Louisville transplant with a cute Kentucky accent and a startling resemblance to Mary Anne's favorite actor, Cam Geary. Logan overhears the girls stressing about how busy they are and volunteers that he, too, is a babysitter. Mary Anne observes Logan on a test sitting job, and he's good with new client Jackie Rodowsky, the walking disaster, but when he attends a meeting, everyone feels awkward and inhibited, unable to indulge in "girl talk." When Mary Anne calls Logan to discuss the club's concerns, Logan tells her he doesn't want to join the club--but he does want to take her to the Remember September dance. Mary Anne and Logan have awkward but adorable dates to the dance and to a party of Stacey's which turns out to be a surprise birthday shindig for Mary Anne, who is mortified by the attention. Logan is understanding of Mary Anne's special introvertedness, and the experience brings them closer together. Mary Anne finally asks why Logan didn't want to join the club, and he says he found the meetings awkward, but he readily agrees to be club back-up in case they get too busy to handle all the jobs. Thus the associate member position was born.

This book contains one of the world's most unappealing descriptions of a first crush (Mary Anne's physiological reactions are just plan frightening; Logan incapacitates her) and one of the world's most appealing descriptions of starting school (Mary Anne, like me, has an affinity for fresh school supplies). Logan is at once alien and unpredictable and sweet and perfect, and the little kinks on the road to true love are largely charming.

Lingering Questions: ONE awkward meeting, and everyone just gives up? I'm sure they would quickly learn not to indulge in too much bra strap discussion, or Logan would quickly learn to just deal with it when they did. It's so sexist that they can't have male members because of their ridiculous feelings about "girl talk" and "boy talk." I bet Kristy would far prefer a moratorium on girl talk during meeting time, anyway. I'll just pretend that Logan had a time commitment issue. He does sports, so it's not unreasonable.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: September of eighth grade. (From now on, I'm not going to say "of eighth grade," because it will never not be eighth grade. I will just note the month or time of year.)

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#11 Kristy and the Snobs Kristy doesn't fit in in her new neighborhood. Louie, her old, sick collie, looks scruffy and bedraggled next to next-door neighbor Shannon Kilbourne's well-groomed Bernese mountain dog, Astrid of Grenville. The Delaney kids are snotty and demanding. And Shannon and her sister Tiffany keep playing practical jokes on Kristy while she baby-sits, such as ordering unwanted pizzas or calling her to tell her the house is on fire when it isn't. Kristy finally figures out that Shannon used to be the main baby-sitter of the neighborhood, and she's territorial. Shannon feels bad for Kristy when Louie dies (event planned Karen invites the Kilbournes to Louie's funeral), and gives her one of Astrid's puppies. David Michael names the puppy Shannon. Kristy asks Shannon to join the BSC, but she is too busy to make the time commitment; she agrees to be an associate member like Logan.

I always forget how good this one is. The babysitting turf war and death of a pet plotlines are unrelated except when they're not; they interact in some surprising, fun ways, and give each other perspective. Shannon's meanness is sufficiently justified to make her transition from villain to hero believable (Kristy would act just the same way if she were a solo baby-sitter facing down a presumptuous club). Louie's suffering and the family's attempts to prolong his life, and their decision to put him down, are heartbreaking, especially on behalf of poor David Michael.

Stop the presses: Kristy misses a meeting to take care of Louie, letting Dawn take over as president.

Read as a kid: Yes, but perhaps not quite as frequently as some of the other early ones.

Timing: Early in the school year. Kristy explains that, what with the BSC activities over the summer, she didn't really start interacting with the snobs until early in the school year. (Her first encounter with Shannon, in which Shannon amusingly calls her "jerk-face," takes place while waiting for the school bus.) The events seem to begin before or simultaneous with the events of book #10, and of course they conclude later (since Logan is already an associate member).

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#12 Claudia and the New Girl Claudia is a smitten kitten when she meets Ashley Wyeth, a dreamy, nonconventional, and amusingly pretentious new girl who is even more serious about art than Claudia. Ashley thinks Claudia has amazing talent and she disapproves of her wasting her time with baby-sitting and other trivial pursuits. Claudia skips out of meetings because she's in "the field" planning projects with Ashley; the club gets mad at her, and worries about making contingency plans if their meeting host drops out. Claudia tries hard to impress Ashley, but she finally decides she would rather have a balanced, fun life than a singleminded one. Ashley disapproves of Claudia's lack of discipline, and they fight. Claudia doesn't have time to finish her sculpture of Jackie Rodowski for the show, and Ashley wins first prize. Claudia and Ashley become "sometimes friends."

This is an odd storyline, not the first thing you would think of, I think, for a kids' book; and that's in part why I think it works so well. I kind of think Ashley is great, and I'm impressed by the plausibility (at least from my perspective, as a layperson) of her wacky Innovative Sculpture Idea. She tries to convince Claudia to jettison conventional wisdom (that sculpture is about making an inanimate medium, clay, look like an animated subject) and sculpt an inanimate object in such a way that it looks animate. It works for Claudia's character that she's so taken in by Ashley's praise. Ashley is obviously someone whose praise is genuine (she doesn't say anything just to be nice) and who really knows her stuff. As Claudia notes, in her schoolwork-oriented family, she's not used to people telling her she's talented and great.

Slash Watch: Okay, so when I was in middle school I rapidly formed an intense friendship with a girl who was better than me at art and I emulated her and she emulated me and eventually we made out, so perhaps I am primed to see this as slashy, but I do get a definite Annie On My Mind/High Art vibe from Ashley and Claudia, both when they're getting along and when they're fighting. Perhaps it's just because Ashley doesn't seem to want any other friends, and so her interest in Claudia borders on obsessive.

• When Claudia first mentions Ashley to Mimi, she says, "We only talked for a couple of minutes, but I think maybe we're going to be friends. Isn't that funny?" and Mimi says it happened the same way with Claudia's grandfather: "In one second I [knew] we would fall in love, be married, have children."
• Ashley suggests that Claudia sculpt a concept, such as love. "How would you sculpt love?" Claudia asks. Ashley: "With gentle curves and tender feelings." (Claudia later makes fun of her for that, but only after Ashley scornfully describes Claudia's interest in children as "sentimental.")
• Stacey becomes very hurt that Claudia seems to have dumped her for another woman, and writes in the club notebook that a real friend "doesn't forget her old friends just because somebody new comes along, whether that somebody is a girl or a boy as gorgeous as Max Morrison." (A fake movie star in the BSC universe; compare to Mary [Anne's Cam Geary.) Is Ashley as gorgeous as Max Morrison?

Lingering Questions: When Claudia is initially describing the girl in internal narration, having only heard her name once, why does she refer to her as "Ashford or whatever her name was"? Really? Is "Ashley" really that uncommon a name?

Read as a kid: To pieces.

Timing: No specific temporal markers, but some mentions of "since the beginning of the year" as though it's not that long ago. Early fall (September or early October) is a good bet.

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#13 Goodbye, Stacey, Goodbye Stacey is profoundly ambivalent when her father is transfered back to New York City. She's excited to be going back to the excitement of New York, but anxious about going back to her old school and kids who made fun of her diabetes, and increasingly sad about leaving Stoneybrook and her BSC friends, especially Claudia. Leading up to the move, she and her friends organize a yard sale for Stacey's family, and the non-Stacey BSC members use the money to fund a surprise goodbye party.

Instead of a specific kid-oriented B-plot, we get a couple of unconnected kid vignettes, some of them setting up future storylines: Jeff Schafer confides in Mary Anne about his desire to move back to California; Mallory Pike is repeatedly described as "practical" and "levelheaded" when co-babysitting her brothers and sisters, who have designated themselves "secret agents" and set up an elaborate system of badges and ranks; Buddy and Suzi Barrett hold an unsuccessful yard sale; and Karen Brewer and her friends are freaked out when Morbidda Destiny invites them over for lemonade.

Not a lot happens in this book, really, but it ends up being a good one anyway. The yard sale is fun, and there are tender scenes of feelings exchanged between Stacey and Claudia, and Stacey and Charlotte. Stoneybrook has been the end point of several moves already (Stacey's original move, Dawn's), but this is the first time we're seeing the lead-up to a move, and both the sadness and excitement are conveyed well.

Lingering Questions: Why can't Stacey's father just commute to the city? Stacey actually suggests this, and her mother tells her it's "too far," but later books state a distance as little as one hour (Get Well Soon, Mallory). I can see why the distance seems great to Claudia and Stacey, because they can't travel without their parents--except when they can--but an hour's commute should seem like nothing to a seasoned city exec, especially one who's gotten a taste of the relative housing prices in Manhattan and Stoneybrook.

While I'm asking questions, I've never been quite sure why, from a series arc point of view, they bothered to move Stacey away and then bring her back fifteen books later. It's not as if they had an actress who was leaving and coming back. Did they plan to move her away permanently, but she was too popular with the fans? Did they know they were going to do the divorce storyline (they seem to hint at it here, actually, as several characters guess that the McGills are getting divorced when they learn about the move), and they wanted the happy reunion to be a result of that?

Read as a kid: Yes, many times. The description of Stacey's departure--sitting in the backseat of a car with a pillow and a thick letter to read--still informs my idea of travelling in style.

Timing: No specific temporal markers, but the weather is nice enough to hold a yard sale, so this must be either fall or spring.

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#14 Hello, Mallory! The BSC is considering Mallory for the club, but they want her to jump through a lot of hoops, including written and oral testing and probationary jobs where other baby-sitters tag along silently judging her. Mallory becomes frustrated: the questions and the grading are unfairly difficult, and they know she's a good sitter. Mallory's new friend Jessi (who moved into Stacey's old house) also feels like an outcast due to some amusingly blatant racism. Mallory and Jessi decide to start their own baby-sitting club, though they don't get many jobs. Meanwhile, the Staceyless BSC can't handle all their jobs and see the error of their ways. Mallory, armed with the upper hand at last, deigns to join the club, but only if Jessi can join, too.

Mallory's voice is good; she does seem younger than the other members, but in a precocious way. It's interesting to see the girls that we normally identify with playing the part of villains.

Slash Watch: "Maybe we didn't belong with some people," narrates Mallory of Jessi, "but we belonged with each other."

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: No specific temporal markers, but there's school, and the weather is nice.

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#15 Little Miss Stoneybrook... And Dawn The Little Miss Stoneybrook competition turns into a babysitter rivalry when each of the four elder baby-sitters trains a contestant (or two, in the case of Dawn, who is coaching the amusingly untalented Claire and Margo Pike). Only Jessi and Mallory have the integrity to check their egos at the door and stand by their opinion that pageants are sexist.

The more interesting plotline in this is about Dawn's brother Jeff, who finally gets permission to move home to California to live with his dad. Dawn is at once angry at him for leaving her, angry at him for not appreciating or seeming to love her and her mother enough to stay, jealous that she can't go too (it would make her too sad and guilty to leave her mother, and she's far less unhappy than he is in Stoneybrook), and dreading missing him. There's not a lot to this story--Jeff's departure is planned for, and then occurs--but the emotions are well rendered.

The two plotlines do not go together at all.

Read as a kid: Yes, but not that often.

Timing: No specific temporal markers, but there's school and complications related to Jeff switching mid-year.

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#16 Jessi's Secret Language Jessi's aptitude for languages (sure) makes her a natural for a regular sitting job with a new family, the Braddocks, whose son Matt is Deaf. Jessi becomes more or less instantly conversational in ASL. Also, despite being the youngest in her ballet class, Jessi earns the lead role of Swanilde in her school's production of Coppélia, because she is perfect at everything. She wins over one of her dismayed classmates just a little when she bonds with the ballerina's Deaf sister. Jessi gets the dance school to donate a block of tickets to all the kids in Matt's class so they can come see the ballet.

This is one of the BSC's PSA books and it seems like large swaths of the pamphlet made it into the text. The ease with which a person can just learn ASL in these books is very silly, and Jessi's attempt to sell it to the Pike boys as a code or "secret language" is dumb. It seems like the writer is under the mistaken impression that that in terms of difficulty and realness as a language ASL is about on the level of Pig Latin (and not, like, Latin).

Read as a kid: Yes.

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#17 Mary Anne's Bad Luck Mystery Mary Anne ignores a chain letter, and mysterious bad things start happened. She begins to receive frightening notes, including a "bad luck charm" which the letter tells her she must wear. Scared, she does as she's told, until her father tells her that her necklace is just a mustard seed, and she and the gang figure out that their school rival (?), Cokie Mason, is behind everything. They booby-trap the graveyard to double-cross the double-crossers.

This is a pretty dumb book. I really can't sympathize with Mary Anne at all. She gets worked up over precisely nothing; what's worse is the rest of the club goes along with her freaking.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: Another "spooky" Halloween book, featuring a Halloween dance with costumes. (Mary Anne and Logan go as cats in the style of the Broadway musical Cats! Logan is so whipped.) This is the first book in awhile with a specific temporal marker. It seems odd that Halloween is happening so long after the start of the school year, but I suppose it's only one POV cycle later--there are just more club members to get through now. Still, there's a definite sense that time is slowing down; instead of one book per month, we have to assume that the last seven books only covered two months of universe time. At this rate, the older girls should be done with eighth grade (ha! ha!) by about book 35 (which interesting is--sort of--what happens).

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#18 Stacey's Mistake Knowing that a lot of kids will need babysitters when her building holds a meeting of the homelessness task force, Stacey invites the (senior) BSC to visit for the weekend for sitting and visiting. Stacey's attempts to get her New York and Stoneybrook friends to mix at a party is a flop. The BSC thinks Laine is snobby; Laine thinks they're babyish hicks. The girls re-bond over sitting, though, and all of the babysitters, Stacey, and Laine are having fun together by the time the BSC has to leave.

This is the first manifestation of the BSC girls' New York personalities, which we'll see again in the New York, New York Super Special. Mary Anne is so in love with New York that she becomes "a walking guidebook," while Dawn, somewhat interestingly, hates and fears everything to do with the city. Kristy and Claudia don't have New York personalities, but it is interesting to see some of the bad sides of their personalities highlighted from an outside narrator: Claudia is snappish and broody, and Kristy is obnoxious and corny. (And entertaining.)

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: Crisp weather, school's in. Fall.

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#19 Claudia and the Bad Joke A new client, Betsy Sobak, is a practical joker, so already my teeth are on edge. (I hate practical jokes.) One of her jokes goes awry, and Claudia falls from a broken swing, breaking her leg. Luckily, the plot shifts mostly to Claudia at this point (although the other baby-sitters still deal with Betsy in notebook entry chapters). We get some of what I think of as the "informational" Baby-sitters Club plots, the ones that show you, "Here is what happens when..." (your family moves; someone dies; you have to go to the hospital). And there's some Claudia inner turmoil where she decides she's never going to baby-sit again because it's too dangerous. Of course, shortly after she gets the cast off, she realizes she misses baby-sitting and the club and her friends; that this was a fluke; and that you can't go through life in a bubble, worrying about what danger is going to befall you; so she re-enters the high-speed world of xtreme sitting.

My main problem with this book is that it seems like there's no particular reason for it to be a Claudia story. They do manage a character-based justification for her fears (what if she'd hurt her arm or her hand? her art would suffer!), but the obsessive fear itself seems a little out of character for Claudia. I mean, I'd expect it more from Dawn, who has a yellow streak a mile wide; Mary Anne, who overthinks everything; or even Kristy, because it would be delightfully ironic from the usually intrepid tomboy. Claudia is the only one, in fact, who has no particular established relationship with fear.

I guess we do get a lot of Claudia brooding and snapping, which is what we always get from Claudia, isn't it? I never noticed this as a kid.

Read as a kid: Yes, more times than you would think considering it's not that good. I did like mundane books about going to the hospital though.

Timing: Cool weather, but it's possible to play outsite; late fall or early spring.

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#20 Kristy and the Walking Disaster The title for this is insanely wrong, since Jackie Rodowsky (the walking disaster who is introduced, and gets more screentime, in #10) is not at all the focus of this story. In fact, it's about Kristy starting her baseball team for kids who are not that good at baseball, the Krushers, and it's exactly as much about Jackie as it is about any of the other kids on the team, including David Michael and Karen, the Papadakises, three Pikes, Matt Braddock, the Barretts, the Kuhns, and several others. The story follows Kristy's idea for the team; organization and practice; meeting Bart Taylor, a neighborhood boy who runs a team called the Bashers; and the first Krusher/Basher game.

This is the most remarkably one-track Baby-Sitters Club novel I've read. There is no B-plot, and all of the baby-sitting interludes are just more Krushers practice with an intro written by some member of the club who is happens to be sitting some member of the team. Since I'm not really interested in baseball, this also makes it one of the least interesting books for me.

Okay, technically, there is a romance subplot--Kristy claims to have a crush on Bart--but it doesn't really come from anywhere or go anywhere or affect Kristy's behavior. It feels unconvincing and wrong, but maybe that's just the queer theorist in me talking.

Read as a kid: I think yes, but I have no specific memory of it.

Timing: During the school year. Most of the action takes place outside, so it's not the dead of winter. I believe spring is the traditional time for baseball stories.

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#21 Mallory and the Trouble with Twins Marilyn and Carolyn Arnold, identical twins, are the troublesome new clients who like to confuse babysitters by switching identities and playing tricks. They calm down when Mallory figures out that their matching rooms and outfits bug them, and they want to be more different. Mallory helps them convey this to their mother.

Lingering Question: Why did the twins let this go on so long without saying anything or expressing their wish in any way? I mean, I can't believe it was never fighting an uphill battle to make two spirited little girls wear outfits they didn't want to wear, or decorate their room in a way they didn't like.

Read as a kid: Yes, many times. Re-reading it, I already knew what the twins' mother's outfit would be, down to the last bow. The description of the fussily-dressed woman stayed with me, for some reason.

Timing: During the school year.

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#22 Jessi Ramsey, Pet-sitter A deadly dull description of daily dog-walking duties is suddenly saved from snoresville by a club procedure B-plot. I love club procedure! The senior club members get into a fight; Mary Anne, Claudia, and Dawn are sick of being bossed around by Kristy and sick of the downsides of their own jobs, and they demand elections. (Jessi and Mallory are extremely uncomfortable and mostly try to stay out of it.) In the end, everyone votes unanimously for the incumbents to remain in their positions, and they all have a good laugh and count their blessings. Even the pet-sitting plot manages to gain a little momentum when Jessi has to miss the originally scheduled election meeting to take a hamster to the hospital. (Of course, because this YA fiction, it turns out she's pregnant. The hamster, I mean, not Jessi. It's not current YA fiction.)

Nitpick: The "everyone is ideally suited to her own office" lesson might have worked better during a Stacey phase. It is certainly arguable that Dawn is ideally suited to the alternate officer job, since she's so "laid-back" and "go with the flow" (according to the other club members), but the arguments that she is the best of all possible treasurers are pretty lame and basically come down to the nonfeasibility of rearranging the other offices. But Stacey is legitimately a math whiz!

Nitpick Resolution: One of my central nitpicks about the running of the BSC is that I think it's silly to expect or to believe that harried parents looking for baby-sitters would remember the thrice-weekly half-hour windows during which they can call, and here it is basically stated that they don't and Claudia earns her vice president rank by taking a lot of out-of-meeting calls.

Read as a kid: Yes. Even then I found the pregnant hamster storyline predictable and trite.

Timing: No specific seasonal markers. It's mentioned that Lucy Newton is eight months old; since Lucy was born in late November of the senior members' seventh grade year (#3 The Truth About Stacey), this would place this book in late July between seventh and eighth grades. Obviously, this is not true. I believe this is supposed to be winter or early spring of eighth grade (sixth for Jessi). Lucy should be about a year and a half old by now. (The time stop affects the young earliest; even the BSC members are textually admitted to be a year older than they were when Lucy was born!)

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#23 Dawn on the Coast On a visit to her father and brother in California, Dawn revels in the stereotypical California stuff she loves, like health food and not being on time. Her friend Sunny has even started her own baby-sitting club, called the We ♥ Kids Club. It occurs to Dawn that she could try and stay indefinitely, like Jeff. She floats the idea with her parents, everyone deals with emotions and begins making inquiries and plans, and Dawn, in one of the Moments of Choice she and Stacey always seem to be in, makes various pro-con lists about going or staying. In the end, Dawn decides to go back to Stoneybrook as planned.

I shouldn't accuse this of being a rehash of Welcome Back Stacey since it precedes it, but it really is a weaker version of the same thing. Stacey's "lists" were weighted in the opposite direction to her choice, making the point that sometimes you have to forget lists and go with your gut. Dawn's list is pretty much balanced, making the point that, I guess, lists are not that useful... and that she should have made the damn list before she called her mother and got her all worried. She basically just upsets everyone for nothing. THANKS DAWN.

(Am I too harsh on Dawn?)

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Jan Carr

Candy's Take: My sister-in-law, a fellow BSC afficionado whom I will refer to as Candy Kane, notes the following oddities about this book, which I will copy and paste without her permission because I like them.

• The creepy Aryan quality of everyone in California. At one point Dawn says, "Blonds, this way!" or something at the beach, and everyone laughs because the whole group she's with--her, all her friends, her dad, her brother, and her brother's friend--are all blondes. And she's weirdly moved by a letter from Jessi where Jessi talks about going back to her all-black neighborhood in NJ and realizing that the more-diverse Stoneybrook is her true home now. Dawn realizes that she, too, prefers the more diverse Stoneybrook to her all-blond Teutonic enclave in Anaheim. I just think this is weird. I know Californians are supposed to be blonde, but isn't that mostly because of bleach and Sun-in? Also, had Dawn never seen an Asian or Hispanic person before coming to Connecticut? BECAUSE THAT IS BIZARRE SHE LIVES IN CALIFORNIA CLAUDIA KISHI SHOULD NOT BE THE FIRST JAPANESE PERSON SHE HAS EVER MET.
• Dawn's "healthy food" is really great. You realize in this book that she is really not a crazy health nut like everyone says she is; she just eats normal stuff that everyone eats today, like tofu and avocado and broccoli pizza. And this book makes it clear that she isn't, like, trying to eat low-calorie food; everything has tons of cheese and stuff all over it, but it usually includes some delicious vegetables. Those other baby-sitters with their burgers and cheese pizzas probably have severe vitamin deficiencies.
• This book might give us the first hint of Ann M. Martin's Disney-mania, with its lovingly accurate descriptions of like five different Disneyland rides, plus a restaurant in New Orleans Square and stores on Main Street USA and Cinderella's Palace. This mania reaches its height in the first Super Special, which basically reads like a giant Disneyworld guidebook. I can't tell if it's insane product placement or if she is just obsessed with Disney.
• What is up with the part where she meets the hot adult director on the plane? Creepy.
• I first encountered the phrase "Kewpie doll" in this book, from Dawn's description of the stewardess. It's one of the moments where the baby-sitters demonstrate their weird sarcastic sense of humor, which is usually rooted in pop-culture moments from their parents' (Ann M.'s generation) and that no one from their (our) generation would ever know about.

Which reminds me (Zelempa) that I almost forgot to mention the Kewpie doll stewardess, which for me is the most hated part of this book. Dawn snots about the stewardess who wears too much make-up and doesn't get her vegetarian order right. With its crotchety sentiment and 1960s pop culture references, the whole grating bitchfest seems out of character for a child--especially one who's described as a laid-back child--and it's also totally irrelevant to the plot. My hypothesis is that it's an unrelated rant about the writer's own experience on a plane trip that she just dropped into this book to pad the word count. For that reason perhaps we should discount it from any assessment of Dawn's character, but it's not the first or last time Dawn displays a sudden and alarming streak of judgmental entitlement. I find Dawn very problematic.

Read as a kid: Definitely. That Kewpie doll reference puzzled me at the time and it puzzles me now.

Timing: Spring Break (whooo).

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#24 Kristy and the Mother's Day Surprise Kristy and the BSC decide to plan a special event for regular clients in honor of Mother's Day: a day off for moms. They take a big group of kids to the carnival and the park from 9-4 on Mother's Day, assisted in transport and lunch-making by local dads. Most of the book concerns the planning for the event; there's also some concern amongst club members about what to get for their moms. Kristy's mother hints the entire book that the Thomas/Brewer clan is about to have a bundle of joy, but she denies that she's pregnant. At the end, Kristy's mom and Watson announce that they've just been selected to be adoptive parents of a two-year-old girl from Vietnam. Kristy's Mother's Day surprise is her new sister, Emily Michelle.

This is a decent book of the low-key, the-BSC-plans-something-and-then-does-it variety. Various parts of the plan unfold, and there are minor snags along the way, but nothing that might be considered a traditional conflict. I actually like this kind of book. It's a relaxing read, the kind of thing this series does reliably well.

Read as a kid: Yes, but I have no clear memory of it.

Timing: Mother's Day, obvs. So this would be early to mid May.

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#25 Mary Anne and the Search for Tigger Mary Anne freaks when she loses her kitten, and she and the club paper the neighborhood with "Lost Cat" flyers. She's further upset that Logan doesn't seem to care. After a brief adventure in which the club members fear they are dealing with a ransom kidnapper (it turns out to be a hoax), Mary Anne discovers that Logan's sister Kerry took in the cat because she wants a pet so badly (her other brother, Hunter, is allergic). Mary Anne suspects Logan of knowing all along, but it turns out that he didn't know, he was just upset about sports stuff, and it turns out the world doesn't revolve around Mary Anne and her cat. HA.

I'm glad this book occurred before #26 and not after, because it would have seemed just viciously petty.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: CHECK THIS

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Super Special #2: Baby-Sitters' Summer Vacation The entire club (including Stacey and Logan) gets summer jobs as counselors-in-training at Camp Mohawk in upstate New York. (Mallory and Jessi are "junior CITS", a new position made up just for them because Mallory is a squeaky wheel, which basically means they are campers.) The gimmick of this one is that Stacey is making everyone write notebook entries on their camp experiences so she can have a BSC keepsake. Postcards to family members and friends back in Stoneybrook start each chapter.

This is one of the better Super Specials; while it still has more storylines than pages, it manages to decently flesh out each one, perhaps by limiting narrators to just club members. Mal and Jessi are in the same bunk, so they essentially have one story, in which Mal is sort of blissfully outcasty and Jessi is uncomfortably aware of it, and both get called racist nicknames. Mary Anne and Logan also show two POVs on the same story, in which Mary Anne, desperate to prove herself to the other CITs in her bunk, who are more grown-up and sophisticated and bad-girlish, attempts to sneak to the boys' side to visit Logan. Kristy faces a similar problem at her bunk, as the other CITs make her over, putting makeup on her and making her feel a profound sense of discomfort and anguish at the Made Up Kristy (whom Kristy insists is not her) that I'm starting to think gender dysphoria. Claudia falls in love with a boy CIT, Dawn gets lost in the woods with her campers, and Stacey contracts every rash and petty camp illness known to man.

Continuity Oddity: Claudia writes to Mimi as "Mrs. L. Yamamoto," making me wonder what Mimi's real first name can possibly be, especially considering that "L" is not a letter that exists in romanized Japanese. Jessi addresses her letter to her parents to Mr. and Mrs. Alex Ramsey, and while Alex is certainly a cute name for a dad to have, I would assume that father of John Phillip Ramsey, Jr., is named John Phillip Ramsey.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: I'm placing this here to coincide with its release date, but there's no real canonically obvious place to put it; it occurs during Stacey's time in New York (books 13-27), but there are no other summer vacation books in that period. Further narrowing down the time frame, Claudia writes to Mimi, so it has to be before book #26.

The question here is, is this the summer between eighth and ninth grades? Books 23 and 24--the Spring Break and Mother's Day books--seem to be leading in that direction, calendar-event-wise. On the other hand, this would mean that books 26-33 encapsulate a complete year, since book #34 states that it's the beginning of summer vacation. Given that it took seven books to get from the beginning of eighth grade to Halloween, it seems unlikely that we would blow through an entire year in just seven more. On the other hand, all of seventh grade only took nine books.

An alternate option would be to declare Super Special non-canon. This would be good for my sanity, since I can't believe that seven girls with so much contempt for rich people could ever go on that many vacations. It would also set a precedent which would allow me to discount mysteries and other specials which might throw off my whole timeline. However, many of thebooks in the main continuity refer to past Super Special events. It's clear that we're supposed to consider them canon.

In the interest of granting all of the books equal weight, and using all of the clues at my disposal to determine the timeline, I have chosen to interpret this as a complete summer. Therefore, we have now officially reached THE END OF EIGHTH GRADE. For future books, I will include a new section, Revised Timeline, in which I will explain what year it would be for the (older) girls if they actually changed grades with each year's passage. (Subtract two years at any given point for Mallory's and Jessi's status.) Since the girls don't, actually, ever escape middle school in the actual books, the original Timing category should still be understood to contain the unsaid, "of eighth grade."

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#26 Claudia and the Sad Goodbye The title spoils you for what you know will be the "death of Mimi" book, but the death itself doesn't occur until halfway through the book, after an agonizing series of frustratingly ineffective hospital stays. Mimi seems to be getting better, and Claudia has a nice conversation with her on the phone the night before she gets up early in the morning for a drink of water and finds her mother crying, and learns that Mimi is dead. The news takes awhile to sink in, and we follow Claudia through various stages of grief as she processes the news, goes to school, goes to the funeral, does her art, takes care of kids, carries on, numb and confused. With its careful attention to detail and moment-by-moment storytelling, this little book holds a lot of story, and packs a big wollop. Impossible not to cry.

Read as a kid: Yes, but not very often, for the same reasons I don't read it very often now. You have to be in the right (cathartic, emo) mood.

Timing: During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Early ninth grade.

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#27 Jessi and the Superbrat Jessi is excited to learn that a TV star--famous for a supporting role as a geeky kid on a school show which seems somewhat like Boy Meets World--hails from Stoneybrook, and is even more excited when he comes to town during the hiatus. Derek Masters is a nice, normal-seeming kid, and Jessi tries to be cool around him and to give as much attention to his little brother Todd. She's sympathetic when Derek tells stories about a boy named John who gives him a hard time in school. Jessi nicknames John "Superbrat." Of course at the end of the book it is revealed that Derek is the Superbrat--he was the one who did all those mean things, to other kids--even though that doesn't seem to make a lot of psychological sense.

Making more psychological sense is a subplot where Jessi, nervous about a big audition, downplays her interest in ballet, and looks into alternate hobbies such as modeling and acting (suggested by Derek, who wants her to come to Hollywood with him). Derek gives Jessi some pointers about auditioning, which is really quite sweet.

What annoys me most about this book is the premise (this is the first of many celebrities who will make homes, or at least temporary homes, in Stoneybrook; later we'll have a princess, which is even more ludicrous), but what annoys me second most is the structure. Jessi HAPPENS to learn about Derek about a day before he comes back into town. You would think the writer could have removed the giant, blinking, annoying coincidence by having Jessi learn about Derek, oh, one day later, say when his mother calls the BSC.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Jan Carr

Timing: During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Early ninth grade (seventh for Jessi).

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#28 Welcome Back Stacey Stacey is distraught when her parents announce they are getting a divorce. She thinks they're just being babyish, and comes up with various schemes to get them to fall in love again. They don't work. She's not looking forward to choosing which parent to live with, but she's intrigued when her mother starts looking at places in Stoneybrook. Once she goes back to see Claudia and look for houses, she's basically sold, though she continues to waffle until the end. (Once again, the title is a spoiler.) After a tearful goodbye with her father, Stacey enjoys a happy reunion with the club.

Although you're both rooting for and aware that Stacey will return to Stoneybrook, her father and New York put up a good argument too, and you can see that the choice is agonizing. It's also nice to finally see a storyline about a kid actually going through a divorce, since divorce has been such a big part of the BSC backstory already. I like to hear about the parents' issues (spendthrift vs. workaholic. While they don't go into the details in front of Stacey, what do you want to bet that Stacey's mom has a "consort"?)

Timing: During the school year (Stacey's parents offer to write her a note excusing her from school the day after they announce their divorce, but Stacey chooses to go rather than hang out with them.)

Read as a kid: Yes, many times. Although I think I bought the books more or less in order (to a point, with a few excursion to the point in the series where the books were just coming out, which was in the 70s or 80s), after I owned them, I'd skip around and read whatever I felt like. Because I owned them longer, and because I just liked them, I tended to read the earlier ones more, and I think I tended to read this one as a follow-up to Goodbye, Stacey.
Revised Timeline: Mid-fall of ninth grade

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#29 Mallory and the Mystery Diary Mallory and Stacey find an old diary in a trunk in the attice of Stacey's new house. The diary belonged to Sophie, a 12-year-old from 1894, who tells the ups and downs of her life, ending with a crime: Sophie's father, a scoundrel, was blamed for the disappearance of a painting from her grandfather's house. Mallory is meanwhile tutoring Buddy Barrett with his reading. When she discovers he's not motivated to read his school books because they're boring, she gives him fun reading material, like comics, and later, the diary. Buddy becomes motivated to solve the mystery, and is instrumental in tracking down a new document in which the grandfather confesses that he framed the father, and had the painting done over. Mallory and Stacey examine the paintings in her attic and find one where a chip in the paint reveals a different portrait below.

There's a lot to like about this one. While a lot of the clues are clumsy (the deus ex confession springs to mind), they could certainly be worse (I especially like that Sophie's diary has a lot of other stuff in it besides the circumstances surrounding the mystery), and there is something very cool about the idea of the painting-over-a-painting. The book creates reasonable suspense surrounding a historical mystery, which is pretty bad ass when done well, and which other BSC books have attempted with far less success (The Ghost at Dawn's House and The Mystery of Stoneybrook spring to mind). It's a bit too neat and coincidental, I suppose, that the events in the diary relate to both the story of Jared Mullray from The Ghost at Dawn's House AND of Old Hickory from Mary Anne's Bad Luck Mystery, but it's more interesting than either of them, and it's actually kind of cool how it fits them together. I rather like the idea of this whole other Victorian Stoneybrook story emerging over the course of the BSC books. I'm very fond, too, of the reading tutoring storyline, both because it works well with the rest of the story, and just because I like tutoring (especially non-traditional tutoring) stories in and of themselves.

Eerily Meta: "I feel as if I'm going to be eleven forever." --Mallory, in her journal

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: Immediately after #28. (Unusually for BSC books, this one depends on and refers a lot to the events of the book right before, as Mallory is helping Stacey and her mother get settled into their new house, which is right near hers.
Revised Timeline: Mid-fall of ninth grade (seventh for Mallory).

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Super Special #3: Baby-sitters Winter Vacation The yearly Stoneybrook Middle School trip to a ski resort in Vermont includes: a baby-sitting emergency (a bus accident leaves a set of school children with injured chaperones); a winter sports contest; a talent show; a dance; and an unresolved ghost mystery. All of the baby-sitters have different storylines, and basically it is just too much stuff and none of it is at all satisfying.

Read as a kid: I have no memory of this.

Timing: Winter.

Revised Timeline: December of ninth grade. This makes both more and less sense than the original timeline; while it makes more sense that a high school than a middle school would go on a ski trip, and the girls' freshman status resolves the question of why we've never heard about such an evnt before, Mallory and Jessi create a problem, as all of the baby-sitters are supposed to be in the same school for this.

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#30 Mary Anne and the Great Romance Richard and Sharon surprise Dawn and Mary Anne with the news that they are getting married. Dawn and Mary Anne immediately begin planning an elaborate ceremony, but Richard and Sharon disappoint them by wanting to keep it simple. Mary Anne's excitement gives way to impotent rage when she is the last to find out that she and her father will be moving into the Schafer farmhouse; she doesn't want to leave Bradford Court, and she's worried that Sharon won't be nice to her cat. Things end on an up note with some reassurances all around; a nice, twenty-person wedding; and Mary Anne and Dawn excited about sharing a room, doing their homework together, doubling their wardrobes, and generally endless-sleepovering. In a foreshadowing-laden subplot, Marilyn and Carolyn Arnold bicker bitterly but become better friends when they move into separate rooms.

This book doesn't have a very tight arc on its own, and notably it's the first and only one to end with, "To be continued..."

Read as a kid: Yes.

Lingering Questions: An overly detailed explanation of "eeny-meeny-miny-moe" follows a pointed explanation of how Haley has been translating various game suggestions to Matt, raising the question, "how do you sign 'eeny-meeny-miny-moe'?" I feel like finger-spelling is prohibitively time-consuming. And why, a few pages later, does Haley finger-spell "monkey-breath"? There's no question she knows the signs for both "monkey" and "breath," and it would also be funnier that way.

Unnecessary Orderliness: Mary Anne has to ask Kristy if Logan can attend a meeting, and she's all huffy and says well okay but it's not "club policy." I thought associates were welcome to attend meetings but generally chose not to? I guess they shouldn't get first crack at the jobs if they don't pay dues, but you'd think they could attend meetings for social purposes and not take extra jobs; it's not as though they'll derail club business.

Timing: No specific temporal markers. During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Spring of ninth grade.

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#31 Dawn's Wicked Stepsister Dawn becomes annoyed with Mary Anne from moment 1 of their sisterhood when Mary Anne catches her mother's bouquet. She has no patience for Mary Anne's sadness at leaving her home, nor for the family's general growing pains (mostly issues with Richard's neatness vs. Sharon's organization and the Spier meat-eating vs. Schafer vegetarianism). It becomes clear to her, too, that the room-sharing arrangement she proposed isn't working out. The girls have too much stuff for one room, and they have different study habits. Rather than propose separate rooms, Dawn, too prideful to admit her mistake, schemes to frighten Mary Anne out of her room by pretending to be a ghost in the secret passage, and it works.

Dawn, as usual, is entirely unsympathetic, even in what is a legitimately trying situation. Could her "real individual" status be a result of her complete inability to empathize with other people?

Continuity Errors: Despite being part 2 of a 2-parter, this book makes some errors in recounting even the events of the previous book, notably claiming that Mary Anne gave Dawn a "now-we're-sisters" present at the wedding (only a few pages earlier if you're reading them back-to-back). In fact, it was the other way around. Also, Dawn seems to be surprised to learn that her father has a new girlfriend, Carol, even though Carol was mentioned in the previous book.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: No specific temporal markers. During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Spring of ninth grade.

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#32 Kristy and the Secret of Susan Kristy takes up an unusual client--an older autistic girl who is temporarily in town while her family looks into a new special home for her. Kristy is determined to "fix" Susan; she feels sure there's a regular kid somewhere in there, if only they could figure out how to communicate with her. Finally, she has to conclude, sad and frustrated, that some problems just aren't fix-able. It's an unusual lesson for the BSC (neatly, the story is handled just as it would be in a BSC book with a happy, successful ending, up until the actual ending), and an important lesson for get-'er-done, take-no-prisoners Kristy.

Read as a kid: Yes, and it's one of the ones I had clearest memories of when I returned to them. I think the ones where I learned something, such as the concept of autism, made a bigger impression on me, or at least more noticeable (since, for a long time, everything I knew about autism came from this book. Well, and Rain Man, which also came out when I was little-little, but I'm not sure I made the connection.)

Timing: Nice weather for playing in the playground.
Revised Timeline: Spring of ninth grade

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#33 Claudia and the Great Search Claudia becomes convinced that she was secretly adopted, a theory which explains all her differences in appearance and personality from her parents and Janine, and the suspicious comparative disparity in number of baby pictures between the two daughters. She seeks out medical and birth announcement records in an attempt to confirm her theory, and actually calls some people she thinks might be her birth parents, but meets a lot of dead ends. Finally, she asks her parents, who assure her that she is not adopted and that in fact she looks a lot like Mimi did at her age.

Meanwhile, Kristy's adopted sister Emily Michelle is having language difficulties, so Claudia plays games with her, teaching her shapes and colors. Mrs. Thomas is impressed and hires her as a tutor; Claudia realizes may not have Janine's brains, but she is a patient, understanding teacher.

Although it ends up being much ado about nothing, I think secret adoption conspiracy is the kind of belief a kid might easily blow out of proportion, especially for a kid with a a strong feeling of not fitting into her own family. (It's also, I think, the kind of thing kids like to daydream about, as evidenced by books like "The Face on the Milk Carton.") This is a particularly poignant story placed as it is in the continuity, the first Claudia book after Mimi's death. Claudia's attempts to discover the truth are thorough and inventive but still fundamentally flawed in a way that seems realistic for a kid schooled in research by mystery novels. And I do love a mystery book.

Mild Racism Alert: Claudia supposes she might not even be Japanese; she might be Chinese or even Hawaiian. Even giving her "magical thinking" leeway, does she really think all look same?

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: No specific temporal markers.
Revised Timeline: Late spring of ninth grade

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#34 Mary Anne and Too Many Boys Mary Anne and Stacey head out with Pikes for another vacation at Sea City, New Jersey. The nice boys from the end of #8 Boy-Crazy Stacey are back, and Stacey and Mary Anne bicker about whose turn it is for a night off so they can go out with them. Mary Anne, of course, has a boyfriend, which makes her situation more complicated; she wants to spend time with Alex, even though it makes her feel guilty, and they end up going out on these weird ambiguous maybe-dates. Finally it turns out that Alex has a girlfriend back home, too, so he didn't think of them as dates. (Or he is also a dirty cheater.) Meanwhile, Vanessa has a crush on the ice cream scoop boy, who has a crush on Mallory.

While not dissimilar to the first Sea City book, it's worthwhile to see things from Mary Anne's perspective, and to see sweet Mary Anne being tempted to do anything immoral.

Read as a kid: Yes, and it made me angry. I unfairly maligned this book as a kid because it was the first one which, for me, made the continuity issues undeniable. It takes place during summer vacation, and yet in #35, they are all back at school! In the same grades!! I ended up more or less considering this and the next book non-canon. (#35 not for any particular continuity issues, but just because it sucked.) After awhile, of course, I had to give up and go with the complete lack of any semblance of sense in the timeline, but it really, really bugged me for a long time. And then I made this. So, I guess I haven't, in fact, gotten over it.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Mary Lou Kennedy

Timing: Early summer vacation.
Revised Timeline: Summer between ninth and tenth grades

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Super Special #4: Baby-Sitters' Island Adventure Dawn and Claudia have a friendly sailing race, each manning their boats with children (Dawn: Jeff and Becca; Claudia: Haley and Jamie). They intend to finish the race with a leisurely picnic on an island and then sail back, but a storm unexpectedly throws them off course during the race, and they end up shipwrecked on an unknown island. Accounts from Dawn and Claudia show increasingly desperate life on the island--they're there for two days with one picnic lunch, little water, whatever minnows they can catch, and almost no survival skills, between six people, one of whom (Jamie) is feverish--while accounts from the other baby-sitters back home show the search and worry that their friends and charges may be dead.

This is such a bizarre and heavy super-special. Considering the shipwreck premise, it's not as outlandish as it could be, and survival stories are interesting (Ann M. wanted to do her own My Side of the Mountain, I guess, and I've got no truck with that). But I'm not entirely sure why it had to be a Super Special. They wanted to show the worry of the people back home, but couldn't that have been done in notebook entries? Claudia emerges as the heroic savior on the island, but her narrative is relatively free of emotional arc. We don't have accounts from any of the shipwrecked children, which could have been an interesting value-add. Dawn really should have been the narrator; her narrative is most frequent and has by far the deepest emotional content. She is frightened and finds it difficult to hold it together and show a brave face for the children on the island. Later, she is ashamed that she wasn't able to be resourceful and strong like Claudia. The explanation for how this document came to be (Super Specials always have them, raising the question of how the books in the normal series came to be) is that Dawn gathered everyone's accounts to, presumably, brood over. I do find it interesting that the person who is ashamed of her behavior wants to dwell on it, while the person who performed admirably is okay to just move on.

Read as a kid: No! I didn't read this until well into this project, actually. Just as well, really, as I think I would have hated it as a kid, anyway (although I did like My Side of the Mountain, I didn't like entries in episodic works which were extremely different in tone or level of reality from other entries, and I didn't like my BSC books stressful.)

Timing: Summertime. The release date of this book places it here, neatly within the same summer as the Mary Anne and Stacey's Sea City trip. That's good; we needed more stuff to have happened in this summer.
Revised Timeline: Summer between ninth and tenth grades.

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#35 Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook Charlotte Johanssen's parents leave town for a few days to look after her sick grandfather, leaving Charlotte to stay with Stacey's family. An old, reputedly haunted house is getting torn down, and Stacey and Charlotte keep seeing and hearing weird things at the house: random flames; a swarm of bees; a face in the window. Charlotte gets sick, and for some low-key entertainment, she and Stacey do research, trying to find out the history of the house. Stacey visits the house's former owner in a nursing home, and he tells her an elaborate story about the house's ghostly history. Everyone turns up for the wrecking, and Stacey vividly sees things no one else sees, including a complex multi-sensory hallucination of the house burning down. She returns to the nursing home and discovers that the former owner is dead, but has left her a letter assuring her that nothing he said was really true; he was just entertaining himself. So it all ends on kind of a note of "huh." And "hm." And "nothing was really explained." If this isn't the most bizarre Baby-Sitters Club book ever, it gives it a run for its money.

To give credit where it's due, the Charlotte-at-Stacey's backdrop is good. I like Stacey as sort of demi-baby-sitter (her mother is actually in charge), Stacey and Charlotte as sisters, and Charlotte not enjoying it because she's too worried and scared. Charlotte's illness heightens both her own misery and the family dynamic. I can see a book working where Stacey gets Charlotte's mind off of her own or her relative's sickness by giving her a mystery to solve, but this isn't that book. The mystery is too weird to meld with the mundane storyline; it never seems quite clear what plane of reality the writer wants to be on. The supernatural has no place in the BSC world, a fact about which I felt extremely strongly as a kid. Sure, the ending doesn't require the supernatural to be real, but it also doesn't offer a satisfying logical explanation for the "clues." It's like watching Lost: all clues, no solution. Anybody can write a mystery like that.

Read as a kid: Yes, and I absolutely hated it. Hands-down, I would have said it was the worst BSC book of all time. (For what it's worth, I don't think I ever got to Mallory and the Dream Horse.) Now, I don't know if I would say that it's even bad, exactly. I mean, it's not good or anything, but it's... it's just so... weird.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Ellen Miles

Lingering Questions: Has Stacey been eating magic mushrooms?

Timing: During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Early tenth grade.

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#36 Jessi's Baby-sitter Jessi's aunt Cecelia moves in, primarily to help care for Squirt, when Jessi's mother gets a full-time job. Jessi resents having to answer to Cecelia, who is more strict than her parents; dictates what Jessi eats and how she dresses; and always seems suspicious that Jessi trying to pull a fast one, undermining the life of baby-sitting responsibility and ballet achievement Jessi is trying to live. A subplot in which Jessi tries to help Jackie Rodowsky enter a model volcano in the science fair and ends up doing all the work herself so that it will be done right teaches Jessi that Aunt Cecelia micromanages because she loves.

Jessi is at probably her most immature in this book, particularly when she and Becca play practical jokes on Cecelia as revenge, but it's not unrealistic considered her age (even her revised age) and the situation; it should come as no surprise that children who are treated like immature little monsters meet expectations. Jessi's frustration with Cecelia's overbearing nature, and with having to answer to someone more strict than her parents, is realistic and sympathetic; Cecelia is both a formidable adult villain (I can't believe she wouldn't let Jessi go to the BSC MEETING!) and a multidimensional person trying her best to establish a place of authority in an existing household, and to find a place for herself in a complete family after the death of her husband and the dispersal of a neighborhood where she once undoubtedly ruled the roost. I'd probably rate this book higher except that the subplot with Jackie is so painfully anvilicious, I can hardly bear to read it (you do learn about volcanoes, though).

Read as a kid: Yes, many times. This is one I have some of the more clear memories of.

Timing: School's in.
Revised Timeline: Early tenth grade (eighth grade for Jessi)

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#37 Dawn and the Older Boy Dawn falls hard when she meets Sam Thomas's friend Travis, a high school boy from California who shares Dawn's love of health food and Aryan features. What's more, Travis seems to like her back--he swings by her school or house to take her shopping or talk now and again, and tells her how she should arrange her hair and what kind of jewelry to wear, which Dawn takes as a sign of caring, Mary Anne takes as a sign of controlling, and I take as a sign he is gay. Dawn's upset when Kristy mentions Travis's high school girlfriend. Eventually she comes round that he is a jerk (which he is, but: sour grapes), and tells him off. As a consolation prize, Mary Anne entices Dawn to become pen pals with Logan's cousin Lewis. A Suspiciously Similar Subplot has James Hobart, one of the Australian boys the club sometimes sits for, allowing himself to be controlled by a school friend, Zach, who calls James weird for writing plays and hanging out with girls. Zach offers to take James under his wing and teach him to be a real man, and the sitters are always disappointed when he goes.

I know all BSC books are the same length, but this one feels very short. There's not much to it. Again, I know these are children's books, but the plotlines are too neatly aligned, and everything is just too beat-you-over-the-head simple. It's hard to sympathize with Dawn when the guy she likes has no redeeming features (all he does is talk about himself and criticize her). It would be ridiculously easy to create a character who is an alluring romantic hero, which would make it actually upsetting when it turns out Dawn can't get him, even if it's totally telegraphed that she won't. (See Jean and Johnny for a sample.) It's interesting, theoretically, that Dawn, the one who's supposed to be so self-confident (although we've never really seen evidence of that in her own books), is the one to be taken in by the Henry Higgins type boy, but it would be nice if the book explained how and why that came to be or acknowledged that it was weird in any way.

The one scene in this book I do like? Surprisingly, the scene where Dawn calls up Travis to tell him off. While I normally hate scenes like this--I think they're unnecessary and unrealistic, and they make me cringe with discomfort--I love the way Travis is totally unrepentant and doesn't even understand what Dawn is saying. He doesn't see anything wrong with how he acted, and thinks Dawn is freaking out over nothing. I'm glad they didn't make him back down and apologize. And it does give some perspective to the whole thing. I mean, he's not wrong.

Read as a kid: I think I must have, but I don't have particular memories of it. But then, I was less interested in the romance plots then than I am now.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Mary Lou Kennedy, a two-shot author whose only other book was Mary Anne and Too Many Boys. She appears to have been going for a more traditional, Sweet Valley-ish, girls-in-love-with-guys type approach, which was perhaps met with some opposition.

Timing: Still fall (Mary Anne and Dawn are shown raking leaves)
Revised Timeline: Early tenth grade, which poses some problems for the plot, since you can't just mentally add one to some of the numbers. If Dawn is in high school, it's not a big deal that she likes a guy who's in high school. Sam is a sophomore in high school when the girls are in eighth grade, so he would be a senior now. A sophomore/senior romance could pose some of the same problems, but it seems unlikely that Dawn would be so out of the loop that she would not know that Travis had another girlfriend if they attended the same school. We can pretend Travis is a college freshman; Sam could still be a friend of his if he hangs around with a group of local college friends of his and/or Charlie's. Actually, it makes more sense for him to be a California transplant if he's here for school.

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#38 Kristy's Mystery Admirer Kristy gets notes from a secret admirer. At first they're sweet, if sort of simplistic ("I think you are nice") and Kristy wonders if they are from Bart, the rival kids' softball coach she likes. But when the notes get creepy ("Violets are blue, blood is red, I'll remember you when you are dead"), Kristy hopes she doesn't have a crush on a psychopath. It turns out that Bart did write the first one, but the rest were knock-offs made by (guess who?) Cokie Mason, as comemmoration of/revenge for the Mary Anne chain letter debacle.

The weirdest thing about the solution to the mystery is that Bart wrote any at all. I was sure it was going to be a kid (the original writer, I mean; the knock-offs were obviously Cokie, since Cokie only appears in a book in which she is a villain.) Major sins commited by this book include: (1) a heterosexual love story centered around Kristy; (2) a glaring continuity issue (I mean, they all have them, but you can't reference last Halloween in a book about this Halloween in both Halloweens occurred in the same year; and (3) a complete and utter knock-off of a previous book's plot. (Not even a good one.)

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: It's Halloween Hop time once again! (Kristy and Bart go as lobsters.) This is one of the books for which the revised timeline makes the most sense, since it does seem as though the years are proceeding one after another--only the grades and ages aren't changing.
Revised Timeline: Halloween of tenth grade

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#39 Poor Mallory! Mallory's father, a corporate lawyer, loses his job in a companywide layoff. Mallory rallies her siblings to come up with ways to save and make money; while the younger kids work hard to conserve electricity, paper, and other necessaries at home, the triplets start an odd job company, and Mallory takes a three-day-a-week sitting job for the Delaneys, rich kids in Kristy's neighborhood. The Delaneys have every luxury, notably their own inground pool, and Mallory feels especially poor in comparison. However, while Mallory's hard times have distanced her from fairweather friends at school and made her closer to her BSC friends and family, Amanda has a hard time telling who likes her and who just likes her pool.

This is a great problem for a BSC member to face--it's not only something that could easily happen in a kid's life, but it fits in with the larger BSC themes of business, money, employment, responsibility, family. Mallory is the perfect protagonist for this with her large, single-income family, and her old-for-her-years tendency to shoulder too much responsibility. I love books that focus on the parents, showing their personalities and their reactions to things, even (especially) when they're not perfect. In this book, Mr. Pike starts out gruff and angry, and seems to feel especially ashamed and defeated when Mrs. Pike announces she will be temping while Mr. Pike is out of work. (Implied sexist but understandable protector impulses!) Later, he becomes Superdad, which pleases the uncomplicated younger kids but frightens Mallory more than yelling!Dad did: he's becoming complacent in his unemployment. I also like the way the sitting plot works so nicely into the larger money concerns, both in terms of the content of the sitting jobs (the rich kids) and on a meta level (the club lets her take a long-term job because she'll need the money the most). The actual sitting plot is a little brick-like in its moralizing, but Amanda's reactions feel fairly real.

Linguistic Oddity: Everyone, including the Pike parents, uses the word "fired" interchangeably with "laid off" or "lost his job." There is an important difference, especially when it comes to Mr. Pike's chances at finding another job.

Lingering Question: While it's understandable that Mallory and the other kids plan to give their earnings to their parents, why do the parents actually take the money? It seems unlikely that a man who was embarrassed about his stay-at-home wife temping to make some extra cash would agree to accept piddling amounts from his children. I guess Mrs. Pike may have been trying to encourage their victory-garden spirit, but she only really scares the kids into thinking the family is needier than it is. Actually, she's really taking it under false pretenses, since Mallory doesn't know about severance pay until the end of the book.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: It's school time, but also warm enough to go swimming a lot.
Revised Timeline: Still tenth grade (eighth, for Mallory), though I don't undestand what time of year this can possibly be. The Delaneys' pool is inground but outdoors, but if this is after Halloween (and before Valentine's Day), it would be too cold to swim. I'm hesitant to keep ratcheting up years (i.e., setting this in May and saying #41 occurs the following Valentine's Day), especially when no specific date or month is mentioned. I guess we just have to assume it's an unseasonably warm November... and/or that the Delaneys have heated panels in their backyard.

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Super Special #5: California Girls The Baby-sitters Club buys a block of lottery tickets and wins $10,000, which they use to fly themselves to California to vacation at Dawn's father's house. Their adventures:

• Kristy scorns the disorganized We ♥ Kids Club, but slightly changes her tune when Dawn's friends prove their knowledge about the children they sit for.
• Mary Anne baby-sits Stephie Roberts, who has asthma. Mary Anne keeps fretting about a possible asthma attack, insisting Stephia can't do things like roller-skate or go on outings, despite the W♥KC sitters assuring her it's fine. This seems weird; hasn't she already learned from Stacey that just because you have a disease it doesn't mean you're sick all the time?
• Claudia awkwardly dates a Japanese boy named Terry who is as smart as Janine. She thinks she's not good enough for him, and sort of playacts along, pretending to know what he's talking about. Predictably, things look up as soon as she relaxes and "is herself."
• Stacey hangs around with an older crowd, bonding with them over her sudden interest in surfing. They encourage dangerous surfing practices, but in a weird left turn, it's not a surfing accident but instead a car accident that provides the climax of her storyline. Stacey is unhurt but shaken.
• Dawn is annoyed by her father's girlfriend, Carol; Carol (Dawn complains) tries too hard to act cool and kid-like. When Carol acts "responsibly" (tattling to Jack Schafer) after Stacey's accident, Dawn sees Carol in a new light. Personally, I feel like Carol is the worst of both worlds--annoying like a kid and untrustworthy like an adult--but I guess all Dawn wants is some boundaries. And she is incredibly self-aware about it.
• Jessi visits Derek Masters on the PS 162 set and is asked to be an extra. The idea to pursue acting is dismissed as quickly as it arises. It's the exact same plot as Superbrat but in about two sentences.
• Mallory decides she wants to be a "real California girl" and dyes her hair using "wash-out" blond dye (I CALL BULLSHIT). She also buys a lot of make-up, even though her parents forbid her to wear it (the laid-back Pikes? Really?) For the rest of the trip she borrows money from Jessi, annoying her. She learns her lesson when the director on the PS 162 set passes her over, and when, after she dyes her hair back to red, a boy checks her out. External validation of her appearance was all she needed!

Like all Super Specials, this book suffers from a lack of focus and an abundance of travel pamphlet product placement (this time, it's Universal Studios instead of Disney), but at least the plotlines are more or less character-organic, with the possible exception of Stacey's.

Ann M.'s Obsessions: Claudia mentions I Love Lucy during the overly detailed description of the plane ride (drink!), and later everyone is impressed by the idea of going to Beverly Hills to drive by Lucille Ball's house.

Timing: It's not made entirely clear, but this seems to be a one-week school break rather than summer vacation. It was released in December of 1990, but there's no mention of Christmas or other holidays. However, the next Super Special New York, New York is explicitly spring break, and there's not enough discontinuity to place this in a different year. Perhaps the girls get a week off after Christmas or something and that's what this is.
Revised Timeline: Winter break(????) of tenth grade.

#40 Claudia and the Middle School Mystery Janine helps Claudia study extra hard for a math test, and Claudia's thrilled when she earns an A-. But her teacher isn't so thrilled. Shawna, the girl who sits next to Claudia, got the same grade, and the same points off for the same questions. Claudia is subjected to disciplinary action for cheating. Claudia is distraught; it seems so unfair that she should work so hard just to be accused, and she doesn't know how to tell her parents she's been branded a cheat. The BSC rallies round and spies on Shawna and her friends; and while they do hear Shawna bragging that she overheard Claudia explaining her extra study efforts and decided that cheating on her would be the perfect crime, they realize that this knowledge is unprovable and therefore useless to them. Claudia finally makes an agreement with the teacher to retake the test; she does well, but Shawna, caught by surprise by the teacher's request that she do the same, does not. Claudia's name is cleared.

In a thematically similar but not identical subplot, one of the Pike triplets breaks a window, but the boys, on an all-for-one-and-one-for-all kick, refuse to say which one it was, so Mrs. Pike grounds all three until the culprit comes forward. Mallory and Jessi stage a dramatic reenactment and trick the boys into identifying the window-breaker, but even after they've been outsmarted they all insist on accepting equal punishment on principle.

This was my absolute favorite BSC book as a kid. I liked school milieus, especially school stories with actual schoolwork in them (there is at least one math problem you can actually do), and I had a fascination with Claudia as struggling student, perhaps because I myself was such a straight-A nerd. I liked that the predicament made sense, and that it arose even though all of the players acted logically (the weakest link is Shawna, who certainly took a gamble by cheating off a bad a student--it seems unlikely that she would happen to hear about Janine's assistance and foresee that it would actually help this time, since I'm sure Janine has unsuccessfully helped Claudia in the past. But it's not impossible.) I sympathized with the sense of unfairness and futility of Claudia's situation (I had a deep sense that elementary and middle school life was unfair and futile.) I liked the sense of the BSC working as a team, rallying around Claudia and maintaing a "we can do anything!" hope even when Claudia is hopeless, and, more unusual, I liked that in this book, Claudia and Janine are such great allies. Janine really goes to bat for Claudia, acting as a surrogate parent at the school and advocating for her even when Claudia's actual parents don't entirely believe her. I felt that the ideas of clearing one's name, reputation, honor, and brotherhood were bad ass.

Still do, really.

Read as a kid: So many, many times.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Ellen Miles

Timing: Schooltime, obviously. There aren't many details other than that.
Revised Timeline: This should occur around December or January of tenth grade, but Claudia doesn't seem to be dressed warmly enough. In her Under the Sea themed outfit, she wears a tropical fish skirt (which I can't believe is lined) and jellies. Maybe she doesn't mind suffering for fashion.

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#41 Mary Anne vs. Logan Mary Anne, feeling smothered by Logan, asks to "cool [their] relationship," which Logan takes as a breakup. Mary Anne misses him and is sad, but when Logan makes a grand romantic gesture and unilaterally declares their relationship no longer cool, Mary Anne realizes she needs to break up with him for real. Meanwhile, Jenny Prezzioso dreads the arrival of a new brother or sister, but is charmed when she actually sees baby Andrea.

This book is basically why I don't like Mary Anne. I'm an introvert. I'm a breaker-upper. I do relate to her desire for space and reading (alone). I even relate to her difficulty expressing that desire (how do you tell someone you'd rather be alone than hang out with them without making it sound like you hate them?) But she is so passive-aggressive about it! We are treated to pages on end of internal monologue whining about how cold she is on their stupid skating date and how upset she is that Logan ordered for her in a restaurant, but to Logan, she just sort of mumbles "I'm a little cold" or "That's not what I wanted" and backs down quickly when he responds. It's realistic, certainly, but it's like listening to a friend who complains and complains but never does anything. She gets more sympathetic during the actual ambiguous breakup, which confuses and saddens her even though she initiated it. Logan is a little out of character throughout, since I don't recall him ever showing "smothering" tendencies before, but it makes sense given Mary Anne's passivity (you can see why the dominance would develop) and Mary Anne does have a history of being attracted to the bossy.

Read as a kid: Yes. Incidentally, this was one of the first books I got when I started re-collecting them in college, largely because it was the one they had in the bookstore where I worked. I ended up coincidentally assembling pretty much the entire Mary Anne and Logan saga before I got anything else.

Timing: February, leading up to and surrounding Valentine's Day.
Revised Timeline: February of tenth grade.

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#42 Jessi and the Dance School Phantom Jessi starts getting threatening notes in her ballet kit after she wins the lead role in her dance school's production of Sleeping Beauty. The BSC helps her comb through the clues and narrow down the list of suspects. It's pretty much S.O.P. for BSC mystery books.

Meanwhile, neighborhood kids hold a pet show. Yawn.

Read as a kid: Yes, and in fact I have a rather sweet memory of reading it out loud to my mom.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Ellen Miles

Timing: School's in, and the weather is nice enough for an outdoor pet show.
Revised Timeline: Early spring of tenth grade (eighth for Jessi)

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#43 Stacey's Emergency Stacey's been feeling tired and under stress with her schoolwork and her parents quizzing her about each other, and she starts sneaking candy. On a trip to see her dad, she's so tired and sick that her father takes her to the hospital. She ends up staying in a New York City hospital for two weeks, alternately feeling better and worse as the doctors try different mixes of insulin. The slow build-up of Stacey's illness, details about hospital life from a seasoned hospital-dweller, problems dealing with parents who refuse to be in the same room with each other, and a couple of fun visits from Laine and the senior BSC members make this book eminently readable. (And we were about due for a Sick Stacey book.) I think this was one of my favorites as a kid.

This book contains the infamous thirsty sequence, where Stacey keeps running to the bathroom of the train to drink water from her cupped hands because she can't get enough to drink. And a generation of girls thought they had diabetes every time they were thirsty.

(As an aside, how awesome is Kristy in other people's books? She World's Smallest Violins Stacey in the hospital.)

Where Is Stoneybrook? In this book, 1:45-2:00 from New York.

Sign of the Times: Stacey is all impressed with the hospital's digital (not glass) thermometer.

Read as a kid: Yes. One of my hospital books!

Timing: During the school year.
Revised Timeline: Spring of tenth grade

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#44 Dawn and the Big Sleepover Dawn and the rest of the club members organize a fundraiser when Stoneybrook Elementary's "sister school"--a school on a Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico where the children are pen pals with SES children--burns down. Kids get really excited when Dawn gets a local toystore to donate awesome prizes; a big sleepover and pizza party at the end of the event are further incentives.

This is a "BSC event" book for sure, with most of the book concerning the details of running the fundraiser, problems and solutions (for example, the girls have to start issuing donation receipts because the kids clamor for them, and permission slips because the kids donate things that don't belong to them). It's a standard BSC story type, and it's done fine here. It does seem a little weird that the BSC is just able to come up with all these ideas, down to the details, which rely on permission, support, and donations from other organizations (notably the elementary school), without including them in the planning. And that the other town just accepts this sudden donation of money, food, and stuff and is all, Thanks! instead of Um we don't need your charity, presumptuous Connecticut people. But I guess that's a whole other can of worms which is not the point of this book.

Read as a kid: Yes. I think I actually rather liked it, because of the organizational details.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Peter Lerangis

Timing: School's in.
Revised Timeline: Spring of tenth grade.

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Super Special #6: New York, New York The entire club goes to New York City for two weeks. Half stay with Stacey's dad, and half with Laine's family. This is a Claudia-initiated trip diary, and she carries the main plotline, in which she and Mallory take art lessons with a famous artist. Claudia is frustrated because he always admonishes her and praises Mallory, but it turns out of course that it's because he sees more potential for improvement in Claudia. The other girls' New York personalities, first established in Stacey's Mistake, are in full force; Mary Anne is a guidebook, and Dawn is too afraid to leave the apartment until she meets a Magical Boy who shows her the Wonder of New York. Mary Anne and Stacey get temporary jobs looking after the adorable children of some English dignitaries (WHAT). Kristy tries to keep a dog she finds in the park. And Jessi meets a conveniently age- and race-appropriate male ballet dancer, whom she convinces to follow his Juilliard dreams despite teasing from the neighborhood boys. On the whole, it's a pretty phoned-in Super Special.

Read as a kid: Yes. I remember the bit where Claudia and Mallory go to the Cloisters, anyway.

Timing: This is tricky. Claudia's handwritten opening narration leaves it ambiguous as to whether this is summer vacation or spring break (intentional spelling errors intact):

Anyway, I had a glorious school vacation coming up. My friends... and I were really looking forward to it. Then I got my big idea. "Please, please, please can I go to New York City for two weeks?" I begged Mom and Dad. "I could take art lesins at the Fine Arts League of New York. They let you take clases whenever you want..."

What school has a vacation other than summer break which lasts at least two weeks? I'm choosing to interpret this as summer. (You may think I'm too quick on the summer trigger, trying to age up the girls for my revised timeline, but believe me, I wish the years would slow down so I didn't have to deal with what I'm going to do when they should have graduated college. There just needs to be a summer here to space out all the Valentine's Days.)
Revised Timeline: Summer between tenth and eleventh grades (or eighth and ninth grades for Jessi and Mal). This is where the revised timeline comes in real handy, because I can't believe that any parents would allow their sixth- and eighth-grade children to go away for two weeks and wander around New York City in groups of one. Even aging Jessi up to thirteen or fourteen, her plotline is still ludicrous. Jessi meets Quint at the ballet, and then visits him at his home. Laine pays some lip service to the idea that she shouldn't be going to strange boys' apartments alone, and insists on walking her over and talking with the boy's parents before she leaves, but even with the revised timeline, Laine is only maximally sixteen. She's hardly a valid adult chaperone. Anyway, what boy is worried about college at fourteen (let alone eleven)? What boy is even interested in girls at eleven? And how did Jessi get permission to even go to the ballet alone (or the money)? This entire book would work better if the older girls were, say, nineteen, and the youngers seventeen, but not even I can make that happen.

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#45 Kristy and the Baby Parade At the behest of Mrs. Prezzioso, all of the baby-sitters take an infant care class at the community center. So that's one part of the book. Then Kristy takes a long-term job with Mrs. Prezzioso, helping her get Andrea ready to be in the biennial Stoneybrook Baby Parade. The BSC decides it should be a part of the parade, too, but they go about their planning sort of half-assed. They put things off and don't do them properly, and nobody consults with anyone else or works together, and they end up with a bad float. I sort of like the idea of BSC book where, for once, something they plan to do doesn't come off; and I do think this is the sort of thing where they would fail, since nobody is really counting on them, and it's not for a good cause except club publicity, so they don't so much want to do it as they feel they should want to do it. But, somewhat like the BSC, I can't get even a little jazzed about the idea of a Baby Parade.

Creep Factor: What is with the weird part where all of the baby-sitters are in total love with the husband of the couple who teaches the class? Even Kristy.

Read as a kid: Actually, I think I may not have. I've read it a couple of times since (despite it being kind of boring) because it was one of the few I had early in my re-assembly mission, but I don't have any memory of reading it as a kid. Perhaps I was picking them based on the interest of their titles at that point and "Kristy and the Baby Parade" just didn't appeal. (I've never really liked the baby-sitting that much. Is that weird?)

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Ellen Miles

Timing: The weather is warm. Parade weather. I can't find a reference to school. Seems like summer.
Revised Timeline: Summer between tenth and eleventh grades

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#46 Mary Anne Misses Logan Mary Anne is assigned to a group author research project with Pete Black and Logan. Cokie Mason, Mary Anne's rival, worms her way into the group as a way of getting close to Logan, which actually seems to work; he agrees to go on dates with her. While Logan and Cokie spend their free time at games and concerts, Mary Anne and Pete feel it's up to them to do the work. Logan finally ditches Cokie and catches up on his part of the project, with Mary Anne's help. They bond.

The project gets a little unrealistically high-stakes when the kids find out at last minute that the authors they are researching will be visiting the school. (Although I do sort of like that there are so many details about fake author Megan Rinehart--most of the books mentioned in BSC books are real, and the way Megan Rinehart is mentioned alongside them, and the details of her fake oeuvre, make her seem realistic. You get a real sense of the kind of books she writes.) In the end, each group member except Cokie delivers a solid speech, and Logan asks Mary Anne out again.

I like Logan and Mary Anne getting back together; I'm a shipper, sure, and I think their problem--basically that Mary Anne was too much of a wimp to state what she wanted--is the kind of thing that time apart can believably solve. (Although I'd have liked the break-up to last more than five measly books! I remember it being longer, perhaps because I had to wait for a new allowance every time I wanted a new book, and I didn't necessarily read them in order. Looking back at them now, it would have been nice if there had been an intervening Mary Anne Stands Up For Things! book.) This is a fairly unsatisfying execution of an inherently satisfying plot advance. While there's a certain amount of yearning and excitement, I feel like more could have been done with the set-up. Neither Mary Anne nor Logan is particularly likeable or romantic. Cokie at least seems more interested in improving her own life than ruining Mary Anne's, for once, but she's just as much of a ridiculous caricature as ever (airhead variety). The babysitting subplot in which Bill and Melody Korman (new kids who moved into the Delaney house) become afraid of an imaginary Toilet Monster is thoroughly meh.

Cover Art Oddity: For all their shortcomings in depicting accurate proportions and physics (the spilling liquid on the cover of Stacey's Emergency is an embarassment), the cover oil paintings for BSC books tend to be true and accurate to the content of a particular scene in the story, with outfit details and so forth generally correct. This is the only book I know of where the cover art depicts a scene which isn't even in the book: Mary Anne and the other senior BSC-ers rollerskating. Weird.

Read as a kid: Yes, several times.

Timing: Schoolyear.
Revised Timeline: September of eleventh grade

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#47 Mallory On Strike Mallory enters a gradewide fiction writing contest as part of a Young Authors Day which will culminate in a visit from a real author (evidently a different event from the one in the previous book, but who knows), but she can never find time to work on her magnum opus; besides her usual baby-sitting and homework workload, in a family like hers, things just come up to fill all available time. She keeps turning down baby-sitting jobs until she snaps and insists on being demoted to an associate member; wise Kristy suggest she take a complete break from baby-sitting for two weeks and see how she feels then. In a similar move with her family, Mallory spends a day "on strike," telling her family she will be shutting herself in her room and must not be disturbed. That day (I guess), she writes a prizewinning story, and makes a point to her parents, who agree to honor a "Do Not Disturb" sign in the future, and take her on a special mall trip, just her. Mallory finds she misses her sibs, though, and spends some of her alone time planning a special day for them to honor them and make up for being a grouch.

This is a strong and about-due Mallory episode. Even her prizewinning story, as it's described (we thankfully don't have to read it) is only partially autobiographical (usually they are TOTALLY autobiographical in books like this, which always confused me; you would think if fiction writers know anything, it's how people write fiction.) Overshadowing everything that came before is the elemental awesomeness of the Explorer Day in the final chapter. The kids get to make explorer hats, put together a homemade instrument jam band, and go on a scavenger hunt for prizes in animal cracker boxes. It's totally the best day ever.

Read as a kid: I have a few vague snatches of memory of this one, but I don't think I read it that often, surprisingly, considering that I rather like Mallory, writing, and labor disputes. It must have been one of the ones I got latest in my original obsession.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Jahnna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner

Timing: Schoolyear. The cover shows Mallory and her friends playing in leaves.
Revised Timeline: September of eleventh grade (ninth for Mallory). This actually makes marginally more sense, since it seems more likely that a high school rather than a middle school would have a Creative Writing class.

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#48 Jessi's Wish Jessi volunteers to fill in for one of the two teachers who runs the "Kids Can Do Anything" club at her sister Becca's elementary school so Becca won't have to go two months without improving their community. She's just in time to witness the return of Danielle Roberts, a club member who took a leave of absence when she spent most of the year in the hospital with leukemia. Jessi thinks a lot about Danielle as she and Becca become friends, and she gets in touch with Danielle's parents after finding out about the Your Wish is My Command (ie Make-A-Wish) foundation which, by the end of the book, sends Danielle and her family to Disney World.

Jessi also convinces the rest of the club to try volunteer jobs, a proposal which Kristy is surprisingly OK with despite the time it takes from her employees. Stacey answers questions for kids newly diagnosed with diabetes; Claudia helps with a kids' art class; Kristy works at a day-care center because of her special connection to working moms; Mallory works at free afterschool camp; Mary Anne works with a brain-damaged boy; Dawn works with kids who have muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis because somebody has to. (What, not cleaning up litter?) It's all wonderful and fulfilling and we never hear about it again.

The general musings on life and death and mortality and hope are pretty decent here, but the overwhelming sappiness can get hard to take. Still, I like that the book ends on a bit of a minor note, with Danielle in the hospital again after her return from Disney.

Read as a kid: Yes, I remember Danielle Roberts clearly. Leukemia was one of the diseases I knew about because of children's books. I also read another book from the Troll catalogue from the POV of a girl who gets leukemia, and the first symptom is a lot of bruises. To this day, I assume I have leukemia if I have several bruises, and diabetes if I'm unusually thirsty.

Lingering Questions: Why does Jessi think that Danielle's parents wouldn't have heard of Your Wish is My Command, and why is she right?

Timing: Schoolyear.
Revised Timeline: October of junior year (ninth for Jessi). Incidentally, fourteen-year-old filling in for an adult at a club for 8- to 10-year-olds makes a lot more sense than an 11-year-old.

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#49 Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street Claudia's new baby-sitting charge is Rosie Wilder, a multitalented seven-year-old who acts in commercials, plays violin, sings, dances, and frequently appears on quiz and talent shows. Rosie is unimpressed with Claudia, and Claudia dislikes her right back, until she discovers that Rosie is unhappy with her stage-managed childhood and would rather just do art. Personally, I'd be like, "Sheesh, the kid is ALSO preternaturally good at the one thing I'm good at?", but Claudia bonds with her over art, and invites Rosie to show her drawings at her own first-ever art show.

Putting together the art show is the subplot. Kristy, ever the self-promoter, suggests that Claudia make her own art gallery instead of waiting around for someone to offer her a show, and the club helps clean out the Kishi garage, hang paintings, and make posters for the event. Claudia's show, named "Disposable Comestibles" by Janine, has the theme of junk food.

Rosie, carrying the A plot, is hard to like--on purpose, but it's effective--and it feels like not a lot happens in this book. At the same time, the art show plot is amusing, satisfying in that "the girls decide to do something and then they do it" sort of way, and contains more vivid description of art-making than possibly any other Claudia book. Not to mention it's so burned into my memory that I didn't need to reread or look up the name of the show.

Read as a kid: Yes

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Peter Lerangis

Timing: Not a lot of time clues, but for a show in an open garage, it can't be too cold out.
Revised Timeline: Must be fall of eleventh grade

Super Special #7: Snowbound An enormous and very sudden snowstorm traps all of the baby-sitters. Stacey is stuck in a car with her mother for awhile (but they are rescued by strangers). Mary Anne and Mallory are trapped in the Pike house with a dwindling food supply when the parents, on an all-day trip to New York City, are prevented from returning home overnight. (Logan skis over with provisions.) Claudia stays with the Perkins girls in a similar situation. Dawn and her mother end up staying overnight at the airport when Jeff's plane is delayed. Bart is having dinner at Kristy's and ends up having to stay the night, which mortifies her. Jessi is stuck at the dance school with a bunch of scared young ballerinas and Quint from New York, who is visiting for the holiday.

This is one of the most mind-numbingly boring Super Specials ever. Because the actual storm only lasts a few hours, we have to see the lead-up, the gathering storm, the snowfall, the post-storm, and the wrap-up from a jillion different points of view. We don't even get any of the unusual, non-BSC POVs (kids, friends, family) that make Super Specials worthwhile. With the possible exception of Stacey, nobody is in any real danger at any point.

Basically, I just don't buy the drama (limited as it is). I don't buy the suddenness of the storm (nobody watches the Weather Channel?), or the total incapacity for everyone. I get that the Pikes and Perkinses and Jeff had travel delays, but Stacey and her mom couldn't get back from the mall? And I don't care how bad the storm was, as soon as she knew the Perkinses wouldn't make it back that night, it would have been much more responsible for Claudia to bring the her charges across the street to stay with her family than to stay alone at their house. There's no way Bart's parents would allow their son to sleep overnight at his girlfriend's house instead of driving the four blocks or whatever to pick him up, even in a storm. Worst of all, Jessi's dad seems to have made no effort to pick up Quint at the train station or Jessi at dance school. What kind of dad would just leave his daughter and the eleven-year-old boy he's charged to pick up and go home? Also, since I'm pretty sure he works in Stamford, going home would have been significantly more difficult than going to find them!

Mary Anne and Mallory's manufactured "danger" is the dumbest of all, not because it's unbelievable that they'd run out of food and have no way of getting to a store in a house with 10 people--it isn't--but because they all starve so quickly. Logan calls Mary Anne and the first thing she says is, "I'm hungry," even though it is 9 AM and she had dinner the night before and ALSO SHE HAD BREAKFAST.

I can understand situations where you'd rather go grocery shopping or rather not drive in the snow, but everyone seems to shut down completely at very slightest inconvenience. Only Logan, a Southerner, has any clue how to deal with a not atypical Northeast snowstorm.

Read as a kid: I don't think so. I have no memory of it. In general, it seems like I missed a lot higher proportion of the Super Specials than the mainline series the first time around, and I think that was a good call.

Timing: December, about a week before Christmas.
Revised Timeline: Christmastime of eleventh grade.

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#50 Dawn's Big Date Logan's cousin Lewis, whom Dawn has been pen-palling since shortly after her dalliance with the older boy, comes for a visit. For some reason, Dawn becomes convinced that Lewis won't like boring old Dawn, so she begins experimenting with clothes, makeup, and sullenness. Nobody likes "the new Dawn," least of all Lewis, whom she is actually pretty mean to. Standing strong with cliche, she drops her act and "is herself" just in time to have one good date with Lewis before he has to go home.

Meanwhile, Dawn is sitting for new clients Norman and Sarah Hill. Norman is overweight and his whole family wants him to slim down. Sarah especially gets into it, blurring the line between encouragement and cruelty. Norman just isn't interested. Striking about this baby-sitting dilemma is that it's not wrapped up in a neat little package--Norman doesn't lose weight, his family doesn't stop pushing him. Dawn just gets Norman to stand up for himself and Sarah to back down a little. (She's a charge, too, so she can't be totally demonized.) There's also some pat tie-in I can't quite remember.

Dawn's and Mary Anne's motivations are both weird here. At first, Dawn seems to be putting on an act as a form of rebellion: Mary Anne seems to be a little too invested in the Dawn/Lewis thing working out, and Dawn isn't so sure she'll like Lewis in person. She thinks of him as "a test case" for future boyfriends, but seems on some level to be trying to sabotage the relationship before it starts. But Mary Anne surprises Dawn by going along with her makeover plan, and Dawn gets insecure, wondering if that means she really does need a total face and personality makeover in order to be the remotest bit attractive to a boy and everyone knows it but her. Dawn is simultaneously trying to attract and repel Lewis, and Mary Anne is simultaneously encouraging and disapproving of her methods. The psychological complexity, while interesting, is handled too clunkily to be intentional. I think it's just sloppiness.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Suzanne Weyn

How Far Is New York? They drive to La Guardia to pick up Lewis. How do they go all the way to NYC and Mary Anne doesn't make them stop to look at the Empire State Building or something

Jeff/Byron Report: Jeff is visiting for the holidays and Dawn finds him annoying, but pleasantly so. Mentions are made of his visiting the Pike triplets, and all three sleep over for New Years.

Timing: December 30 through the end of January. Lewis comes during his school vacaton, although SMS is in session. How does he have vacation in mid-January?? Surely he had Christmas off too. It just doesn't add up.
Revised Timeline: Same, of eleventh grade

#51 Stacey's Ex-Best Friend Stacey begs Laine to visit Stoneybrook on her February break, but when she gets there, things don't work out. Laine mocks the BSC girls for being too suburban and immature. Attempting to manufacture fun for Laine, Stacey convinces her to accept Pete Black's invitation to the Valentine's Day dance, but at the dance, Laine is mean to Pete. Stacey and Laine get into a huge fight, and Laine goes home early. Stacey reflects sadly that despite years of friendship, Laine has become "a person she no longer wants to be friends with," and sends her a letter to say so.

Meanwhile, the BSC plans a Valentine's party for local kids and there's a dumb subplot involving Nicky Pike and James Hobart having crushes on the Arnold twins.

While the book does a pretty good job of painting Laine as an unpleasant person--while remaining true to both the good and bad sides of her we've seen in past books--it's off-putting that Stacey sees herself as a hero/victim when she's not. She's quick to anger, and to see this as an issue of "Laine has changed" and not "I have changed" or even "Laine is in a bad mood." While it is certainly believable that Stacey takes her own side in the argument, it feels like the Book is agreeing with Stacey (I mean, she's the narrator, but you know how you can sometimes tell when the Book disagrees with the narration character). The letter at the end is supposed to provide satisfying closure on the Stacey/Laine friendship, but I don't buy that the friendship was already over; Laine is pretty clearly just going through a pretentious phase. No, what ended the friendship is that terrible letter.

Weirdest Moment: One shining moment of Laine's underlying "good" personality is when, at the end of an otherwise unsatisfactory sleepover, Claudia picks up the TV Guide and says, "Hey, you know what? To Kill a Mockingbird is on!" "All right!" says Laine. I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird is a deeply emotional and thought-provoking movie and all, but: "All right!"?

Read as a kid: Yes, many times.

Timing: Late January through just after Valentine's Day. They are getting really sloppy. It's only been ten books since the last Valentine's Day of eighth grade.
Revised Timeline: February of eleventh grade. A lot in this book has to do with ages and maturity, and in general it does seem to work better if you go ahead and add the 3 to everyone's age and grade. Stacey is scandalized that Laine has a 15 (18) year old boyfriend in high school (college). Nicky and Carolyn are starting to develop crushes at eight (eleven). Laine thinks baby-sitting is a kids' job and they should be thinking about getting real work, such as the cashiering job she's signed up for. (Most places can't legally hire teens under sixteen.) There are a couple of places where it pointedly doesn't work--specifically, when Laine thinks it's lame that their dates can't drive them to the dance; if they were all sixteen, somebody would probably be able to. But this is understandable; as fast and loose as the writers often are with the level of independence these kids have at thirteen, the driving age is one place where they really can't abandon the pretense.

As a general feel, I do think the story works much better if you (a) assume a lot more time has passed since the last time Stacey spent a lot of time with Laine than the few months or weeks that would be required if this were all in the same year as Stacey's Emergency, Stacey's Mistake and New York, New York; and (2) see Laine as the kind of high-school girl who's yearning for it to be over so she can move on and move out and grow up, while the BSC girls are the kind of high-school girls who love high school.

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#52 Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies Mary Anne and Dawn daydream about their parents having another baby, until hard times babysitting for infant twins and a school egg project teach them to take parenthood more seriously.

The egg project is highly standard move for this kind of book. I'm surprised the BSC series hasn't already done it. Probably because they're not HACKS. (Correction, weren't!) The writing in this book is bizarre; it's a choppy, short-sentenced style. It actually reads a lot like a Baby-sitters Little Sister book. This isn't one of the ones that's attributed to a ghost writer, so my guess is that Ann M. had been immersed in Little Sister writing for awhile before coming to this one.

Lingering Questions: Why is everyone so highly conscientious? They overwhelm themselves going overboard with this dumb assignment. Hint: It is not that hard if you don't actually pretend the egg is a baby. Is the first Modern Living assignment, where Mary Anne and Logan have to research apartment costs and figure out how they would support themselves if they became a married couple now, highly flawed, or is it just Mary Anne and Logan's dumb interpretation of it? They're trying to find an apartment they can afford, but their only income is thei baby-sitting money, and they still have to go to school. Obviously it's not going to work! The same point could be gotten across just as well or better if they also had to research salaries and figure out what they would be qualified to do for full-time jobs.

Slash Watch:

      "Are all of you engaged to be married?" asked Mrs. Boyden at the beginning of class.
      Four boys raised their hands. "We aren't," they said, looking disgusted. And Gordon Brown added, "There are nine girls and thirteen boys in this class, Mrs. Boyden. All the girls have been taken."...
      "Gordon, you're right. Two of our couples will consist of boys only. How do you want to handle that?"
      "I am not going to be a girl," said Howie Johnson. "Well, neither am I," said Gordon and the other boys.
      "Do they have to decide ahead of time who's the wife and who's the husband?" asked Logan. "Maybe they could deicde later. Maybe they wouldn't even have to tell us their decisions."
      Mrs. Boyden opened her mouth to say something, but before she could start speaking, Howie said, "Yeah, yeah. We'll decide later."

After all this set-up, this is never mentioned again.

Read as a kid: This is one of the first ones I got in my re-assembly, but I'm pretty sure I never read it as a kid. Other egg project stories, sure. The BSC egg project story, nope, somehow I missed it.

Timing: Schoolyear. Nice enough weather to take the babies on walks in their stroller.
Revised Timeline: Early spring of eleventh grade. This is one of the few stories around this time which would work better with the canonical ages, if not younger. The assignment and the reactions and thought processes all seem jarringly juvenile, even for eighth-graders.

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#53 Kristy for President Kristy feels her ideas for how to improve the class are much better than the eighth-grade presidential candidates', so she runs for office. She quickly becomes exhausted trying to juggle schoolwork, babysitting, Krushers practice, family and friends, and campaigning, and schoolwork is first to fall by the wayside. She considers temporarily dropping out of the BSC for the rest of the campaign, but she doesn't see her workload getting lighter if she's elected, and dropping out of the BSC is prospect that makes her deeply unhappy. Realizing the presidential office is the most expendable of her responsibilities, she swallows her pride and drops out of the race.

This is a mostly well-done story which does a good job of capturing the feeling you get when you have just too much to do, and illustrates that you sometimes need to quit something to do justice to the other things in your life, a philosophy which I as a frequent quitter wholeheartedly endorse.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Dawn is so cool that when they are ordering a pizza she requests "'shrooms."

Read as a kid: I don't believe so.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Nola Thacker

Timing: No specific temporal markers. Clothing seems to be fairly bundled (sweaters and stuff), but that could just be Kristy. You'd think you should be able to figure something out based on when school presidential elections are (end of the year for the next year, usually, right? but they're all running for the officer of their own grade, which suggests beginning of the year.) I guess different schools could do things different ways but it seems odd not to elect officers until the middle of the year.
Revised Timeline: Actually, considering that it'll be June in two books, the easiest thing for me is to ignore the running-for-eighth-grade thing (after all, every year is eighth grade) and assume it's a spring election for next year's positions. They're in eleventh grade now, so it's possible (not like they're about to go to college), and senior class president would be an important position.

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#54 Mallory and the Dream Horse The premise of this is solid, which is why it's so disappointing that it sucks. Mallory goes to considerable trouble and expense to get a beginner's course of riding lessons, wheedling and pleading and promising to pay for half, wiping out her babysitting savings. Once she actually starts taking lessons, though, it's difficult and unfun. I am primed to relate to this, since some of my main personality traits are being vaguely discontented about things I am doing, being totally gung-ho about things I am not yet doing but planning on, and hating any endeavor in which I don't excel. I also happen to know that the simplest tasks involved with riding are a lot harder than they look. So I think a good book could be made out of this, particularly if a ghostwriter who knew anything about riding could be found (which it wasn't. All the stuff about riding was frustratingly vague; inaccurate, according to the Amazon reviewers; and, in complete opposition to the theoretical lesson, made riding seem so easy).

The order of events is obvious--girl begs and pleads for lessons, girl gets lessons, girl is embarrassed by her own incompetence, girl sticks it out miserably--and the book more or less follows this, but in a just-sort-of-not-really kind of way that makes it weirdly hard to follow. First of all, Mallory is not a bad rider. She had already ridden in a previous Super Special (which I guess isn't the ghostwriter's fault), so she already knows how to mount and dismount, etc., and basically has no trouble with anything. Then at about the third lesson, she falls from one of the horses and claims to be afraid to ride after that, but this does not manifest in any way other than she says so in internal narration. She does mediocre at the climactic horse show and then decides not to take any more lessons.

A trio of side plots don't do much except to bury the central storyline (such as it is):

(1) Mallory identifies one of the horses as her "dream horse" based on its beauty; the writer misses an obvious opportunity to make her "dream horse" obnoxious (the old Mean Pretty Crush storyline, but with horses), or to have her bond with one horse but then have to ride another in the Big Show. No, she just bonds with the perfectly nice "dream horse" and then gets to ride him in the show.

(2) The other kids in the class--eleven identical cookie-cutter rich snobs--look down on Mallory for not having the right riding gear. Mallory is so desperate and idiotic about making friends with them that it's embarrassing. She keeps going up and introducing herself, dominating conversations, and forcing her number on people. The writer misses the opportunity to teach either the "people can smell desperation, play it cool" or the "you won't make friends if you don't put yourself out there, you never know" lessons and basically seems to just being making the point that rich snobs suck. This is disappointing from a series which is usually so careful not to make rich kids easy targets for malice and villainy.

(3) Jessi is jealous because her parents won't let her take lessons (she's already too busy), and Mallory continues to be impossibly, uncharacteristically dense in every conversation with her. Jessi basically comes out and tells Mallory what's wrong, and Mallory's all, "I wonder what is wrong with her?" Children's books don't have to be this stupid!

This is not even mentioning the totally irrelevant Pike talent show plotline, and the baby-sitting plot in which the central premise is that Nina's mother doesn't know what's wrong with her, even though all of the baby-sitters independently and immediately figure out that Nina is sad because the kids make fun of her for taking her blankie to school, which Nina's mother could not not know, and which Dawn resolves with no input from the book's ostensible heroine Mallory.

I can't in good conscience give this any stars. Look, you can either write an interesting plot against the backdrop of a poorly-researched horse show, or write accurate information about the ins and outs of dressage with no point, and I would enjoy either one. But when you give vague and inaccurate information and fail to deliver any kind of useful or satisfying plot, then you don't get any stars, is all I'm saying.

Read as a kid: No. (Do I just give lower marks to the ones I didn't get exposed to as a kid? Am I Hallowell?)

Timing: Unknown
Revised Timeline: Spring of eleventh grade (ninth grade for Mallory)

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#55 Jessi's Gold Medal Jessi's deal is basically that she's amazing. She's the world's best ballet dancer, scoring all the lead roles in her school's productions even though she's the youngest in the class. She's a natural at picking up languages, and learned ASL in basically five minutes. And as it turns out, she's an amazing swimmer. Her first swimming lesson in gym class, and she's recruited to the synchronized swimming team. (At least this is sort of related to her established dancing skill.) Jessi and her partner are both relative newbies and, to prepare for the upcoming SMS Sports Festival, they practice every spare minute, making Jessi exhausted for ballet. Although they ultimately succeed and (spoiler alert, TITLE) win a medal, Jessi decides to quit because ballet is more fun for her.

There are some more Sports Festival hijinks in the background. Amusingly, Kristy and Alan Gray trash-talk massively before a one-on-one footrace in which the loser has to be the winner's slave. (Kristy wins, but only by a hair.) Also, there is a baby-sitting subplot where the BSC puts together (what else?) a silly Olympics for the neighborhood kids.

This is one of those books with little to no traditional "conflict", but the details about synchronized swimming feel real (although I have no way of confirming them), the narration is solid and there are decent jokes. Jessi feels likeable.

Read as a kid: I think so, maybe once.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Peter Lerangis

Timing: June. There's hot, summer weather, but they're still in school and Jessi describes it as "only the beginning of summer," trying to convince her parents to buy a pool in time for the brunt of the heat. As a bonus chronological tidbit, we know it's an Olympic year--the Summer Olympics are mentioned several times. Hmmm, I wonder who sponsored this title.
Revised Timeline: June of eleventh grade (ninth for Jessi). I'm glad this is one of the fake years in which all the girls are in the same school, so I can just say it's the SHS Sports Festival and don't have to fudge some kind of cross-school collaboration. A high school is much more likely to have such an event anyway.

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Super Special #8: Baby-sitters at Shadow Lake Ugh, I read this several months ago, but I don't want to re-read it for the rating. Super specials are uniformly subpar and boring, and this one is solidly middle of that pack. Okay, so Watson's aunt offers to give him her lake cottage (what is this, Ontario? Muskoka? People have cottages?) since she can't get out there much anymore and she doesn't want to see it go to waste. Watson brings the family, including Kristy's nine million friends, to the cottage for a test run, and Kristy has everyone write up a journal so she can present to him just how much fun they all had. As usual, there are a few too many events, including a culminating dance at a nearby lodge (what?) and an overnight stay on a possibly haunted island with a mysterious past, the resolution of which is left for a future book which never, thankfully, happens. What is with the Super Specials and their unresolved ghost mysteries?

Milestones: Sam and Stacey seem to get together after Sam spends the whole trip mocking and annoying Stacey, only to confess his feelings in the end. They go to the dance together.

Read as a kid: No.

Timing: Summer.
Revised Timeline: Summer between eleventh and twelfth grades (ninth and tenth for Jessi and Mal).

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Special Edition Readers' Request: Logan's Story Logan reluctantly agrees to fill in as full member when Dawn is suddenly called to California to help Jeff recover from an operation. He's not prepared, though, to deal with the consequences--missing practices, letting down his team, and a sharp increase in mockery, generally on the theme that he is a girl. He drops out of the BSC altogether, but then misses sitting and goes back to associate member.

The plot of this story is fine--surprisingly inoffensive, actually, given the repeated use of girl as insult, but it's not presented as a good thing, and it helps that Logan really isn't all that girly (well, only comparatively, perhaps)--but what really makes this an enjoyable read is Logan's voice. He's funny, colloquial, kind but not too emotional, energetic, thoughtful, and totally sympathetic. I wish there were more Logan books; he's easily my favorite baby-sitter. Does that make me sexist?

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: Fall (football season)
Revised Timeline: Fall of twelfth grade

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#56 Keep Out, Claudia! A new client, the Lowells, are perfectly nice when Mary Anne sits, but with Claudia, the kids are terrors. Then when Jessi comes to sit, Mrs. Lowell won't let her in the house. Kristy figures out that Mrs. Lowell is a Racist. They don't know how they should handle Mrs. Lowell if she calls again; when she actually has the audacity to call and request the blue-eyed blond-haired baby-sitter Mary Anne mentioned, Kristy tells her they're all busy. She doesn't call again. Meanwhile, Claudia helps neighborhood kids form a weirdly enormous band consisting of kids with musical talent (Myriah Perkins, Marilyn Arnold), kids who take lessons (Shea Rodowsky), and about a gajillion skill-free kids with homemade drums and kazoos and stuff. They perform what must be a totally terrible recital of all the music from "Fiddler on the Roof." (The racist disapproves because she hates Jews, of course.)

This is a sort of disappointing book as some BSC books have handled serious issues well (even the first Mallory book did an okay job with racism), but this was just a total VSE, and it felt very contrived and unnatural, with a clear division between "US" (Good People) and "THEM" (bizarre, unmotivated, universal racism). Claudia is a weak choice for narrator. The issue of racism has nothing to do with her personal character, which I suppose is the point, but she's sort of the most boring, passive character in the story. All she does is get sort of alarmed and upset and let Kristy sort it out. More interesting emotional stories were hinted at for both Jessi (turning hard and cynical when the racist bullshit rears its ugly head yet again--wondering if she'll ever get away from it) and Kristy (wondering how a president should deal with this situation; can and should she refuse to serve a particular client on moral grounds? will it be bad for business? is it disrepectful to her elders? how can see even prove Mrs. Lowell is a racist? is it okay for her to get as indignant, or more, as Claudia and Jessi, even if she herself is "approved" by Mrs. Lowell?)

Oddly Great Moment: When Mary Anne is telling the Lowell kids about the other kids in the club, she mentions that Mal has seven brothers and sisters. "She must be Catholic," says the oldest girl without missing a beat. Heh. That's exactly what my mom said. (Does that make her racist?)

Lingering Questions: Are there really racists like that? Mrs. Lowell is this odd combination of silent (she won't come out and actually say anything) and brazen (she's coolly logical and shameless about actually keeping people of color out of her life, and cherry-picking white baby-sitters). How come Jessi didn't figure it out, if she's supposedly been the victim of all this prejudice because of her race in the not so distant past? How has Claudia never experienced racism? Is Mallory Catholic?

Read as a kid: Pretty sure I didn't.

Timing: No specific temporal markers. Some events occur outside.
Revised Timeline: Fall of twelfth grade

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Mystery #5: Mary Anne and the Secret in the Attic
Mystery: How come, while poking through the attic looking for information about her mother, Mary Anne found photos and letters which indicate that she lived on her mother's parents' farm in Iowa for over a year just after her mother died?
Solution: Mary Anne lived on her mother's parents' farm in Iowa for over a year just after her mother died.

You can tell this book is trying hard to follow the formula of Claudia and the Great Search: a BSC member researches her own past; avoids asking outright for some contrived reason; and finally has a talk with her parent(s) in which her fears are put to rest. This book just doesn't hold a candle to that one, though, for the following reasons:

1. While at first glance Claudia's "search" seems fairly unmotivated, it makes a lot of sense when you consider that it comes very soon after both Mimi's death (and the loss of the only person who Claudia really connected to in her family) and the adoption of Kristy's sister. Mary Anne's search for information about her mother is just completely unmotivated. The book starts with a dream, but that's kind of a cop-out. Besides, what motivated the dream? Why now? Whatever stopped her from wondering or asking about her mother before--why isn't it stopping her now?

2. Once Claudia gets the ball rolling, her actions drive the plot. Nothing coincidental happens. That's called "reasonable storytelling." But, check out what happens in this book: Mary Anne has already found all her evidence when she listens in on a phone call in which HER GRANDMOTHER CALLS HER FATHER. Part of the whole point of the story is that she's never met her grandparents (that she can remember) because of the bad feelings between them and Richard, and her grandmother HAPPENS to call for the first time in 10-16 years RIGHT NOW? I DON'T THINK SO BOOK.

3. Claudia doesn't know about her adoption because there's nothing to know; she wasn't actually adopted. Mary Anne doesn't know much about the time when her mother died and she lived in Iowa because... because... why, exactly? While I can totally believe that she has no memory of her time on the farm AND that nobody ever told her about it because they didn't think to/didn't realize she'd forgotten, it's weird that she knows so little about her mother in general. She's never seen any photo albums! She doesn't even know where her mother's grave is! Richard never thought any of that was important?

4. Both books would have been much shorter if the girl in question just asked her parent(s) early on, instead of trying to do "research," but in Claudia's case, it makes a lot more sense that she doesn't. She wants to believe she belongs to another family, because she's disappointed with hers. She also seems to be aware, in her heart of hearts, that she's wrong, but she wants to ride the magical thinking train a bit longer. Mary Anne, meanwhile, fails to find any answers to her questions because she's... lazy? Melodramatic? Likes to angst? That she doesn't ask her father is almost believable to me; they don't communicate that well, and she claims the subject of her mother is painful to him (though later, when he talks about it, it doesn't seem to be, particularly.) But it's admitted early on that the Kishis and Mrs. Thomas probably know something, and she just... doesn't ask. Yet she doesn't seem to have any real motivation for not wanting to know, other than her fear that her father didn't want her, which seems like something you would WANT to disprove.

Read as a kid: Not even a little bit.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Ellen Miles

One Admittedly Nice Moment: When Mary Anne goes to the cemetery looking for her mother's gravestone, she finds herself at Mimi's instead. It's adorned with fresh flowers from the Kishis. Mary Anne cries for the mother-figure whose life and death she was old enough to understand, and, suitably catharsis-ed, goes home.

Timing: No specific temporal markers. There is a picnic. School seems to be in, but Mary Anne is evidently in Iowa for 1-2 weeks in the last chapter. Richard then writes to invite Mary Anne's grandmother to Christmas, so it must be before that.
Revised Timeline: Fall of twelfth grade.

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#57 Dawn Saves the Planet For an ecology project in science class, Dawn and Stacey teach a class for kids on pollution and ways to conserve. Dawn realizes the kids are right when they tell her it will be difficult for them to get their parents to bring their recyclables to the recycling center, so she campaigns the middle school to start a recycling program--she'll get student volunteers to set up bins and help unload cars, and parents volunteers to bring the cans and bottles to the recycling center. Dawn becomes bossy about both projects, ordering Stacey and the other BSC members around, and yelling at students for using Styrofoam containers. A student interest survey reveals that lots of students are interested in helping the program, but they don't want Dawn to run it. Dawn apologizes for being overbearing to Stacey, and they run a successful "Green Fair" for the kids. Dawn writes an essay about how she realizes that you need to work together to do great things like saving the Earth, so you can't alienate people.

Going Green. Wow. It's depressing how far we haven't come since 1992.

While the lesson here is decent--definitely better than some of the more apathetic versions of this plotline, where someone gets too self-righteous about an Issue, can't understand why no one else cares about said Issue, and then in the end gives up, at least a little, to get along--it's a little frustrating that everyone who cares about something is generally portrayed in fiction as obnoxious. (As true to life as that may be. Hey, did you know that shampoo is bad for the environment and unnecessary? You can wash your hair with baking soda. Pass it on.)

In general, this is one of the sloppier books. The information is not quite processed enough. Dawn and Stacey sound like pamphlets, and the kids don't interact with the information much except to say "Wow!", etc. I didn't read this one as a kid, so I'm not sure what a child thinks of it, or someone who's encountering the information for the first time, but I think a little save-the-Earth info dropped into unrelated books would have stuck in my mind more than the infodump here. On a more nitpicky level, there's an awkward and jarring use of third person (third-person descriptions of babysitting jobs, opened with a notebook entry, are a standard series-wide device which I have no problem with; early entries took care to include the narrator saying something like, "Stacey told me about her job at the Pikes' later..." but we know the drill by now. No, in this book, a conversation between Stacey and Claudia is just dumped into a non-babysitting chapter, with no explanation of how Dawn knows about it! In fact, she would never know, because it's a private conversation between best friends, and it's about how lame Dawn is.) Not to kick a book when it's down, but there are also a lot of typos. And as you can probably tell by now, I am not that good at finding ypyos.

Read as a kid: I don't think so.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Jahnna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner

Internal Inconsistency Alert: Funny how Dawn doesn't seem to think producing tons and tons of fliers is a waste of paper, or consider it problematic to have everyone make all those extra car trips to cart around recyclables.

Slash Watch: People keep remarking on the length and intensity of Dawn and Stacey's hugs. "Stacey... let out a big squeal of delight at my news. 'All right!' Then she gave me a big hug. I caught Brent Jensen nudging his friend Todd Long and pointing at us, a smirk on his face. Stacey stuck her tongue out at him and I said, 'Take a picture, it'll last longer.'" And later, "I threw my arms around Stacey. Behind me I could hear Jessi whisper to Mal, 'Don't you just love happy endings?'" The chapter following the above quote mentions in an offhand fashion that Dawn spent the night at Stacey's house.

Timing: No specific temporal markers. Some events occur outside.
Revised Timeline: Fall of twelfth grade

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#58 Stacey's Choice Stacey's mother comes down with pneumonia just before Stacey is supposed to go to New York to be her father's date to a company banquet honoring his promotion to vice president, causing Stacey to debate which parent needs her more. In the end, she attends the banquet but steps out to call her mom several times and insists on leaving early to catch a train, so that neither parent is satisfied. In a surprisingly subtly related choice-over-compromise, you-can't-have-it-all kid storyline, the Pike youngers and their friends spend their allowances on a lot of "nearly free" mail-order junk instead of buying more expensive toys, but end up with nothing that they actually want.

The book is successful in presenting a genuinely difficult decision with arguments on both sides without making the parents too childish (although they are by no means particularly grown-up; but I think Stacey's parents have always been believably immature). Stacey is superhumanly responsible, I'd say even more so than Kristy; I love that that's a consistent trait she has across most of her books although it doesn't seem to be one that the other girls particularly pick up on in their descriptions of her, dazzled as they are by her NYC fashion sense.

Textual puzzle: When Stacey polls the other six baby-sitters about her dilemma, "three would go to New York, three would stay home." Which three? It would have been interesting to see the list of names on each side; you could come up with a justification for almost any permutation, so it could have been random. Here is my best guess, though:
Stay home: Mallory, because she believes that in a family everyone should pitch in, and she would believe that the dad would understand that; Kristy, because although she appreciates success, her feeling of responsibility for caring for the infirm or unable would outweigh that; Mary Anne, because although she loves New York and glitz and glamour she has a martyr complex and would insist it is more right to do the less fun thing.
Go to NYC: Claudia, because as someone whose family has shafted her achievements she would see the value of having that support (although as someone who has been dragged to Janine's banquets etc., she has a complicated relationship with that, so who knows); Jessi, because anyone who does ballet must believe that success is of greater importance than physical discomfort; Dawn, because she is heartless.

Perplexing referent: In a list of adults who respond to Stacey's request for "mom-sitters," people to look in on her mother when she's at school or away, she offhandly mentions "Mary Anne's mom." Mary Anne's mom is dead! Does she mean Sharon, Mary Anne's stepmom (ie Dawn's mom)? It would be reasonable, perhaps, to describe Sharon as Mary Anne's mom during one of the periods when Dawn is across the country, but this is not one of those times.

Read as a kid: Yes.

Timing: No specific temporal markers.
Revised Timeline: Fall of twelfth grade

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#59 Mallory Hates Boys (And Gym) After humiliation on the volleyball court, Mallory refuses to participate in gym class, leading to detention and letters home. Meanwhile, the boys of Stoneybrook seem to be acting up, and Mallory dreams up an elaborate conspiracy theory. When Ben Hobart and his little brothers seem to be the only sane boys left in town, Mallory and Ben agree to "trade brothers" for a night, only to have the Hobarts become terrors in the relatively lax Pike household (while the triplets and Nicky are on their company manners at the Hobarts'.) The volleyball unit gives way to archery, which Mallory finds she is actually good at, concluding the gym torment plot with a "this too shall pass" moral.

Mallory's gym class complaints are smart, in-character and some of the sharpest, funniest rants in all of BSC history. Maybe it just appeals because I had the exact same thoughts when I was a kid, but it's clear the book was written by someone who had had this exact experience.

Read as a kid: Yes. I specifically remember this was, at one time, by far the latest book I had, so I must have got it around when it came out--or I just skipped ahead in the series since this one looked interesting--which explains why I read it a comparatively large number of times to the other books around this general time period. I read it many, many times. I related.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Suzanne Weyn

Timing: No specific temporal markers, but it seems to be cold out.
Revised Timeline: Late fall/early winter of twelfth grade (tenth for Mallory)

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Mystery #6: The Mystery at Claudia's House
Mystery: Why does Janine suddenly care about make-up and clothes?
Solution: Janine has a boyfriend.

It's hard for me to tell whether or not this is a decent book because I liked it so much as a kid. The actual mystery is overwhelmingly solvable and barely interesting enough even to Claudia to support the story, making it feel weirdly short. On the other hand, the individual scenes tend to be good. Claudia has a nice rapport with Derek Masters, who's home on hiatus and full of fun mystery-solving tips from a guest appearance on detective show. There's some cute role reversal of Derek as expert/consultant and Derek as nervous kid who lied about his kissing prowess to his friends when a courtroom scene that Derek and Claudia set up to force confession from Janine actually forces a confession from Derek.

Read as a kid: Absolutely. It was one of two mysteries that I owned (the other being the also surpisingly excellent The Clue in the Photograph). Years after I'd read the book, I retained an incredibly vivid memory of the scene Claudia gives Janine a makeover using her own clothes but Janine's basic style. So, like, instead of a long gray pleated skirt, an Oxford shirt, and a navy sweater, Claudia gives her a short black pleated skirt, a fitted blouse, and a bright blue and green sweater. I thought of it every time I tried to do something similar--approximate a particular style using clothes I already owned, or clothes not necessarily intended to work in that style from Goodwill or something--and eventually I generalized it to any situation where you use a set of objects gathered or intended for one purpose to approximate or adapt a set of objects in another category. It's a surprisingly useful metaphor understood by an extremely small number of people.

Timing: School is in, Derek's show has finished shooting for the season, and the weather seems nice. I've placed this here in the sequence because of its release date, but it appears to take place in springtime.
Revised Timeline: ? of twelfth grade

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#60 Mary Anne's Makeover Mary Anne gets a haircut.

That is the plot of this book.

This may be the pinnacle of Mary Anne's tendency to make mountains out of molehills (Maid Mary Anne gives it a run for its money, admittedly). Mary Anne is so upset when none of her BSC friends compliment her haircut (to be fair, they are actively mean about it, for some reason) that she cancels plans with them and stops going to meetings, opening her up to renewed BSC criticism that she is a slacker and ditches her girlfriends for her boyfriend. Finally they talk things out, of course. A subplot where Carolyn Arnold claims to be building a real time machine and goes so far as to take reservations for trips to different time periods, getting herself in deeper, has a similar "much ado" type moral.

This is another one of the weird BSC in-fighting books where everyone seems to act OOC villainous (funny how these all seem to be from Mary Anne's point of view; maybe she's the only one who notices). There are some things that ring true in this story, certainly. It makes sense, for example, that Mary Anne and her father would want to do something just the two of them, and it also makes sense that Dawn would feel left out. And it is disappointing when you get what you think is a nice haircut and your friends comfort you that it'll grow back. Sometimes people say that even when the haircut isn't bad, but surprising and different. But this drama is a maybe five-minute interlude in a book about a topic. It is not a book topic. I'm also put off by Mary Anne's monumental self-discovery as a Person Who Could Look Good with Short Hair. Nobody cares about your jaw except you, Mary Anne.

Read as a kid: I don't remember if I actually read it, but I knew about its existence, because every subsequent book described Mary Anne's past AND present hairstyle as if it held grave importance. I remember thinking of books as the classic, long-hair Mary Anne ones and the new, weird, short-hair Mary Anne ones.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Peter Lerangis

Continuity Errors: Lots! Mary Anne states that Marilyn and Carolyn had to dress the same until "I spoke to Mrs. Arnold..." Damn lies: that was Mallory. One of the major players in a bit of drama involving rumors about a high school boy liking Mary Anne is popular girl Sabrina Bouvier, who was originally introduced as an eight-year-old beauty pageant veteran in the Little Miss Stoneybrook contest. At a meeting, Claudia gets out Milk Duds when everyone is already eating Milk Duds.

Timing: January. (Don't the previously-on type recaps make your brain explode sometimes? When Mary Anne goes from describing her New Year's resolutions to her past relationship problems with Logan, I want to shout, "IT WAS VALENTINE'S DAY THEN AND NOW IT IS JANUARY OF THE SAME YEAR. HOW IS THAT NOT A PROBLEM?")
Revised Timeline: January of twelfth grade

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#62 Kristy and the Worst Kid Ever Kristy's neighbors the Papadakises take in a foster kid, the recently orphaned Lou McNally, who despite Kristy's and the rest of the baby-sitters' efforts to be kind, acts mean, gruff, and defiant, and gets the other kids and pets riled up. Finally a home is located for her where she can be with her brother, and she cheers up and leaves.

While I think this could have been a good storyline--that is, sometimes a kid you feel bad for, who's had a bad life, really is impossible to deal with. But they really pulled their punches with how bad Lou is; she sometimes seems cruel to the animals, but she has an explanation (she's trying to play games with them that her dog liked), and she trashes Karen's playhouse at one point, but by this time she's already been dubbed Worst Kid Ever for no real reason. While it's not said overtly, it does seem at times that her gender ambiguity seems to count toward her messed-up factor (she refuses to wear girls' clothes or play with girls' toys, but when she breaks down and cries about her family, she does so while holding one of Hannie's dolls, as if she REALLY REALLY wants to be a NORMAL LITTLE GIRL but just CAN'T, blech). This seems hypocritical from Kristy's point of view.

Speaking of point of view, it's Dawn who gets to be present at Lou's big breakthrough crying moment, which is just lame. Why not Kristy? Not only is it better for Kristy to get the big moments in a Kristy book, it makes more sense that Lou would make a personal connection with her tomboyish neighbor than another lame girl babysitter.

There is an extremely dumb subplot where Kristy and the rest of the baby-sitters are competing with Cokie Mason for best contribution to the Stoneybrook Middle School fundraising auction; Cokie's dad, a record store owner, donates a shopping spree. The BSC write to celebrities asking for autographed personal items. It would have been an okay plotline, if irrelevant to the main story, if they didn't get any, or if they only got one from the most obscure celebrity, but then their throwaway submission, a coupon for 24 free baby-sitting hours, went for a lot higher than they expected. Instead, they at the last minute DO get all of the celebrity gear (!!!), AND their baby-sitting coupon goes for a lot more than expected, which is just dumb.

Lingering Questions: In either the actual or my proposed version of the auction storyline, the question remains how high a baby-sitting coupon can actually go. While I'm sure the baby-sitters' services are more valuable than they realize, I mean, at a certain point, it's no cheaper than just hiring them the normal way.

Unnecessary Stereotyping: Kristy deduces the identity of Lou's social worker by noting that the woman with her is "pinch-lipped, as if her shoes were too tight." What? Why does everyone want to hate on social workers? While I have no doubt that many foster kids dislike and resent their social workers, I don't understand why they get such a bad rap in the general world; they're by definition people who want to help others for very little pay.

Read as a kid: Pretty sure I didn't.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Nola Thacker

Timing: No specific temporal markers. There's a lot of playing outside, but it seems to be pretty cool out, lots of coats and sweaters.
Revised Timeline: Early spring of twelfth grade.

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#63 Claudia's Freind Friend Shea Rodowsky has been diagnosed with dyslexia, and Mrs. Rodowsky asks one of the baby-sitters to tutor him. Claudia doesn't have enough confidence in her own abilities to volunteer for the job, so Mary Anne takes it, but Shea is so easily frustrated and volatile that it's slow going. Meanwhile, Claudia's English teacher tells her she's in danger of failing if she doesn't bring her grade up, so Stacey volunteers to tutor her, but she gets overzealous and treats Claudia like a child. They fight. While baby-sitting, Claudia is honest with Shea about her problems, and they start helping each other, sharing tips and giving each other flash cards and humble, non-condescending help.

There is a pretty lame but very minor subplot where the BSC receives anonymous notes and assumes (a) that they're from various boys (including an infamous Kristy-wears-a-skirt sequence when she tries to seduce a confession out of Bart on the basketball court, and he is just confused), and then (b) that they're a practical joke, like Cokie Mason is always playing. It turns out to be secret option (c), that some baby-sitting charges including the Rodowsky boys are trying to thank them.

I love tutoring plots, and while Claudia's complaints about Stacey are understandable, Stacey's enjoyment of her schoolteacher role and the office supplies that entails is also sympathetic.

Read as a kid: Yes, several times. This was another of the few that I skipped ahead in the series to get. Not sure why. I did prefer Claudia to all the other sitters, so perhaps I couldn't resist jumping to the current book when it was a Claudia. With weird orthography in the title!

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Nola Thacker

Timing: It's described as an "unusually hot day" when the kids can take off their sweatshirts during Krusher practice, suggesting fall or spring.
Revised Timeline: Earlyish spring of twelfth grade.

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#64 Dawn's Family Feud Jeff visits the Schafer/Spier household for his spring break. Richard is the only one who is able to take time off during the workday to spend with Jeff, and they don't have any of the same interests. The visit culminates in a long-weekend family trip to Boston, on which nobody can agree on what sites to visit and arguments always seem to end up Schafer vs. Spier. On the last day of Jeff's visit, back in Stoneybrook, a portrait photographer can't get them to all look happy together, and they all crack up when they see the horrible snapshot proofs. They start having fun mere hours before Jeff goes home and regret spending the whole time arguing.

The most notable thing about this book is the sheer percentage which is unprocessed Boston tourism infodump, including, but are by no means limited to, this representative conversation where they're deciding on their vacation destination:

        "I've always loved Boston," said Richard. "Because of the clam chowder and the historic old sights. Faneuil Hall, Bunker Hill, the Freedom Trail."
        "I think watching whales would be the absolute best," Jeff said, leaning forward in his seat.
        "I heard the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is good," I said. "And scary."...
        "I want to go to the Museum of Fine Arts," said Mary Anne. "It's supposed to have one of the best Egyptian collections in the world."
        "Oooh!" Jeff turned to me. "You'd like that. All those dead mummies wrapped up in ace bandages."
        "How about the Public Garden at Boston Common?" Richard asked.
        "Yes!" We all cheered at that one.

It seems pretty clear that the person assigned to do this just called up a bunch of Boston tourism pamphlets and had nothing else to go on, but why didn't they just make it be about a place they had actually gone?

Boston nitpicks: Technically, the Public Garden is a different park from Boston Common (it's across the street, also tons better.) Boston Common would remind exactly nobody of Central Park in New York; it's obviously much smaller and there's nothing in it. Irregadless, you can't take Columbus Ave from the Hancock Tower to Boston Common. Neither one of those things is on Columbus Ave. And coming from the west, they would have hit the Public Garden before they reached the Common. Finally, what deli did they go to near the Public Garden? Deluca's market? Because there's no bench in front of there.

Where is Stoneybrook? Richard wakes Dawn up at 5 AM, saying if they leave now, they'll make it Boston "just in time for lunch," indicating that Stoneybrook is six or seven hours (about 400 miles) from Boston. Not possible. Stamford is only 3 hours away, and you can't get much further from Boston than that and still be in Connecticut.

Read as a kid: I have no memory of it.

Timing: It's spring break for Jeff, and there's a long weekend which is probably either Easter Monday (although Easter is not mentioned) or Memorial Day.
Revised Timeline: Spring of twelfth grade.

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#65 Stacey's Big Crush Stacey crushes hard for a Tom Cruise lookalike student math teacher, "Call Me Wes" Ellenburg; she takes his favor in class and his palling around with her and accepting her help with his filing as interest, and in a physically excruciating escalation, writes him a poem. Wes sort of ignores it, which gets Stacey's hopes up even more, until he crushes them at the Spring Dance telling her outright that it's never going to happen.

A small Charlotte subplot has her temporary crush on a boy in her class leading to the cute moral, "Boys are dumb; it's stupid to even think about them," and another subplot where Mary Anne and Dawn care for a goat is so jarringly dissimilar in content and tone that it is difficult not to skip it.

This is one of the more emotionally painful BSC books; Stacey's feelings are intense and her hopes are as understandable as they are clearly doomed. Wes comes off as slightly creepy by continuing to act warmly toward Stacey even after he's read her poem, but it's pretty clear he's just trying to be nice and doesn't know how to react. He's not mature enough himself to realize that Stacey's crush isn't just going to go away if he ignores it. I like that they didn't give him a girlfriend or any excuse, once his job's done, not to date Stacey other than her age; it makes the point stronger that that's insurmountable.

Read as a kid: No.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Peter Lerangis

Slash Watch: I can try to read something into Claudia assuring Stacey she will fall in mutual love some day, but I think she is really just being nice.

Fun Facts: Stacey's father went to Wesleyan. Really? Wesleyan? He must have had a wild, liberal youth.

Timing: The last few weeks of the school year, ending with the Spring Dance about a week before the end of school.
Revised Timeline: End of twelfth grade. While I don't think it's unbelievable that love's magical thinking would convince a 13-year-old she can date a 22-year-old, a 17-year-old could definitely consider herself reasonable girlfriend material for a young teacher. The age gap could be the same; it makes sense to add about four to his age, too, as 22 really seems too young for a public middle school student teacher. He should be nearing the end of his grad school, not undergrad.

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Special Edition Readers' Request: Logan Bruno, Boy Baby-sitter Logan starts hanging out with the "Badd Boys," a sort of gang or at least consortium of young thugs who wear leather jackets and shoplift and stuff. He thinks they get a bad rap and he forms a friendship with the leader, T-Jam. But he changes his mind when he realizes T-Jam has been using him for his trustworthy clean-cut Ken Doll looks and his friendship with the owner of a record store. After social engineering some inside info, T-Jam stages a heist of boy band records, making Logan an unwitting accomplice. T-Jam threatens to implicate Logan if Logan tells, but is sweet to him as long as Logan stays silent, including giving him a Badd Boys jacket and tickets to see the boy band (for Mary Anne, of course!) Logan feels stuck until he learns that the tickets were stolen from a girl in school, and he feels bad. Mary Anne encourages him to tell his parents, who encourage him to tell the police. They can't do much to T-Jam, anyway, as he's a minor, but I guess it's the thought that counts.

The title of this book is misleading; it's not really about Logan's struggle as a guy baby-sitter, not nearly as much as the previous one was. However, his insecurity about his manliness and his baby-sitting-related loss of upper hand in dealing with bullies is what sends him into the arms of T-Jam, it's arguably a driving force of the book.

Okay, so this is one of multiple BSC stories in which shoplifting is like, the most evil thing you can do and the bad kids are all so bad and so cliche, but, I don't know, I like it. Logan's voice is fresh and funny as in his first book, and T-Jam is quite likeable, too, really. He's got a real classic bad boy charm, complete with the apparently genuine and slightly wistful appreciation for the nice-guy hero. You root for him, and for Logan's friendship with him. Or maybe just I do, because I like things that are so, so gay.

Slash Watch: Mary Anne of Logan and T-Jam: "You let him have your combination? I don't even have your combination. I guess you guys are real close."

Tertiary Character Watch: Why is it Lew Greenberg who says, "Don't you guys ever feel like being bad everyone once in awhile--just in fantasy?" and Austin Bentley and Trevor Sandbourne who scoff? Trevor Sandbourne totally wants to be bad every once in awhile and, what's more, I don't understand why he is even friends wit all these jocks when clearly he is a precious, troubled flower. It's like the writers don't even remember why Claudia was in love with him in the first place in book #2.

Read as a kid: Yes. Obviously I was going to pick up the second Logan book.

Timing: Springtime (nice weather)
Revised Timeline: Spring of twelfth grade. I actually super buy this as a time for Logan to be getting in with bad kids; it's the end of an era, he's bored and anxious, and kind of wondering what it all might have been like if he hadn't been afraid to cut loose and be bad every now and again.

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#66 Maid Mary Anne Mary Anne becomes the default gofer when her sewing teacher, Mrs. Towne, has a bad fall. A promising premise is hampered by poor execution. I can easily see how a well-meaning but pushover-inclined teenage girl could let herself turn slavish to a demanding but pitiable elderly lady. This could be very morally gray, making the lady increasingly unpleasant but also not a villain--she's lonely and ill, and nobody else will help her, so she ends up putting too much stress on the nice girl and breaking her. This could be a real and interesting problem.

Instead, it just... isn't. Much of the beginning is taken up with ridiculous and unnecessary emotional agonizing on Mary Anne's part about her being too shy to ask Mrs. Towne for sewing lessons. Once Mrs. Towne breaks her ankle, she starts calling Mary Anne and asking for favors a lot, and Mary Anne always does them. It cuts into her social life and homework time. The thing is... Mary Anne never hesitates, and Mrs. Towne is never anything but nice. She doesn't seem to take Mary Anne for granted, really; Mary Anne is just a complete jellyfish. Finally Mary Anne gets up the nerve to give a touchy-feely speech (my least favorite kind of fictional conflict resolution), and Mrs. Towne is just like OH OK WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY. Leaving the reader asking... so, what was the conflict again?

Meanwhile, Buddy and Nicky are called sissies for joining Mary Anne's kids' sewing class; and while Mary Anne is self-absorbedly attempting to become a nicer person, she totally ignores Dawn's enormous hints that she wants to go back to California.

Read as a kid: No.

Author Gratefully Acknowledges: Nola Thacker

Typo Alert: Dawn's name is once written "Mary Anne." I've made some really random errors in writing, to be sure, but I'm not even sure how that mistake gets made.

Lingering Questions: How come Mary Anne acts like she's never seen tea before? Is tea that unusual? I know for a fact that she has drunk lots of tea in the past; Mimi's special tea if nothing else.

Timing: Summer vacation.
Revised Timeline: Summer between twelfth grade and... ?

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