The Baby-Sitters Club

Book Review: Mary Anne Saves the Day

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Mary Anne Saves the Day
The Baby-Sitters Club #4
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen. And at the time, my name was the same as the founder of the BSC (with the first name spelled slightly different). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

Mary Anne was the character I most identified with in this series. She’s quiet, shy, and doesn’t like conflict. And she makes a new friend by sort of falling into it, which is about the only way I ever made new friends in school too. Her character grows a lot in this one book, as she confronts not only her fighting friends but also her over-protective dad. The fight between the members of the BSC is unfortunately very realistic for the age they are. Of course, as an adult, I wanted to sit them all down and make them stop being stupid, but I’m sure when I read it originally, I sided with one or another of the characters. Also as an adult, I feel like it’s a bit of an overreaction to take a kid with a fever and no other symptoms to the emergency room unless the kid had some kind of pre-existing medical condition. Overall, though, this was a fun book to re-visit.

Whether or not this book will translate well to kids and pre-teens now, I couldn’t say. I wish I had thought to start reading this series to/with my daughter when she was around 8-10, because I think she would have enjoyed it, and we could have discussed the good and the bad of the books.

Find out more about Mary Anne Saves the Day

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: The Truth About Stacey

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The Truth About Stacey
The Baby-Sitters Club #3
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen. And at the time, my name was the same as the founder of the BSC (with the first name spelled slightly different). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

I have to admit that the storyline of Stacey trying to break out from under her over-protective parents didn’t resonate much with me. That’s probably because I’ve never been in the same situation as either a child or a parent. I suppose some would say my mom was overprotective, but it was in a very different way and I didn’t feel particularly bothered by it at the time. The side plot about the competitive agency interested me a little more, especially since I knew that of course the BSC would come out on top. Their reactions may have been a bit immature, but hey, they’re 12-year-olds, after all! Sometimes they talk or act older than that, but it’s nice to have a reminder that they’re still…well, immature.

Whether or not this book will translate well to kids and pre-teens now, I couldn’t say. I wish I had thought to start reading this series to/with my daughter when she was around 8-10, because I think she would have enjoyed it, and we could have discussed the good and the bad of the books.

Find out more about The Truth About Stacey

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls

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Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
The Baby-Sitters Club #2
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen. And at the time, my name was the same as the founder of the BSC (with the first name spelled slightly different). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

Claudia’s interactions with her sister and grandmother were my favorite parts of this story. I also liked that, though they were irrationally scared, the babysitters came up with protocols to address the potential of someone breaking into the house. They kept telling each other/themselves that they probably didn’t need to be worried about a thief who hadn’t harmed anyone, but at the age of 12, I can easily understand that fear would take over when they’re alone with little kids at night. In fact, I’m sure younger children reading this might be a bit freaked out by some of the night scenes in this book. Though I guessed the outcome of the phantom storyline (not sure if it was a pure guess or something I remembered from reading this when I was young), I’m sure most kids wouldn’t. However, I don’t particularly care for that outcome nor how Kristy responds to it.

Whether or not this book will translate well to kids and pre-teens now, I couldn’t say. I wish I had thought to start reading this series to/with my daughter when she was around 8-10, because I think she would have enjoyed it, and we could have discussed the good and the bad of the books.

Find out more about Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: Kristy’s Great Idea

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Kristy’s Great Idea
The Baby-Sitters Club #1
by Ann M. Martin

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

For complete transparency, I’ll say up front that I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen. And at the time, my name was the same as the founder of the BSC (with the first name spelled slightly different). Nostalgia will hugely affect my reviews for this series, and I have no plans to try to be objective.

I enjoyed diving into the first book in the series and witnessing the birth of the Baby-Sitters Club anew. I struggle to actually envision these pre-teens as 12-year-olds though. My daughter is 14, and I can’t imagine her talking and acting like these characters do 2 years ago. Maybe that’s a difference in time periods, or maybe it was Martin’s attempt to make the plot plausible. On the other hand, Kristy acts very immature with her mom and mom’s boyfriend/fiancé, while most of the maturity is related to the girls’ babysitting abilities and experience, a nuance that might actually make sense after all. I look forward to the evolution of the club, which starts in this book and I know will continue in future books as the girls add more protocols and members.

I remember doing a small-scale version of this with my friend (we lived in the country, so it definitely didn’t work quite as well, but I did get one summer-long job out of it). I don’t remember if it was inspired by the series, though I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have influenced us to some degree, but I can say that I was not nearly as professional as these girls. I checked out the e-book on a whim while waiting until I had time to pick up a book I had on hold at the library, and I was sad that the e-book doesn’t have the distinct handwriting of the club members. I’ll definitely get physical copies as much as possible as I continue through the series. I don’t know how far I’ll get before stopping—maybe once I am past the books that I would have read due to outgrowing the books, or maybe further. Whether or not this book will translate well to kids and pre-teens now, I couldn’t say. My guess is no, but maybe if your kids are interested in reading about a somewhat simpler time (it’s so weird to say that about my own childhood period, but it really is true—and I have now realized that this book came out 40 years ago, and now I feel really old) they’ll enjoy this book.

Find out more about Kristy’s Great Idea

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If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Writing Wednesday: IWSG Jan 2020

/ Kristi / 6 Comments

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I’ll be honest–I love talking about my writing history. So today’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group question just begs to be answered. Here is the question posed for today’s IWSG post:
What started you on your writing journey? Was it a particular book, movie, story, or series? Was it a teacher/coach/spouse/friend/parent? Did you just “know” suddenly you wanted to write?

The journey I took to get to this point amuses me greatly when I look back at it. The furthest back I can remember (on this topic) is when I was about 10 years old. I wrote a story about a couple that adopted two girls. When I think back to this story, I remember it as much longer and grander than what it actually was. I typed the story on my parents’ Tandy 1000, and even wrote a sequel. A few years ago, we fired up that old computer and I happened to find the story:

The Nickersons

Apparently I didn’t like the space bar…

I actually remember how that story was supposed to end, but there wasn’t going to be much more to it.

I also remember being sent to an enrichment class in school, though I don’t remember how old I was at this point (late elementary school, I think), due to my penchant for making up stories. They wanted to encourage my creativity, and I was taken out of normal class time for it. There were two other kids in the class–one was was an amazing artist, and I don’t recall the other one’s talent.

Around the age of 14, I got even more ambitious and started to write a story that I anticipated being a full-length novel (full-length for middle grade fiction, at least), and the beginning of a series. The main characters were a set of twins (girl & boy), and I based a lot of the other characters on a lot of people I knew at that time. I never finished the first story, but I still have what I did write, in the below notebooks.

1

Overall, I think both of these dreams were inspired by series like The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, Addie McCormick, and Mandie books, as well as many other series and stand-alones I read back then.

Fast forward to high school, and my fiction writing dropped away. I wrote some poetry in high school, a few notable pieces, but nothing spectacular. I took a creative writing class in my junior year, I think it was. A few years ago, I dug up a reflection paper that I wrote at the end of that class where I stated that though I’d enjoyed writing the short story required for the class, I didn’t think I’d have a reason to write fiction again in the future. And I didn’t until I was inspired by a computer game.

Pithea cover, KindleMy first full-length novel, Pithea (which releases this Friday!!!), had its foundation as fanfiction for the game Ragnaok Online. This started about 15 years ago, and about 7 years ago I began the journey to use the characters and some of the basic plot lines and create my own world. Now, with book #1 about to come out and at least 7 more planned, I really can’t imagine not being a writer.

Wherever this book and series takes me, however big or small they turn out to be, I know I will always be a writer at heart, and really, I always have been.

For my fellow writers, what does your writing history look like?

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