Mallory and the Trouble With Twins was my favorite BSC book as a kid. I loved the Bellairs shopping trip, and the idea of the twins’ clothes expressing their personalities, and the presents they got for their birthdays. Rereading it now, though, there is one passage that just really bothers me:

Mrs. Arnold showed me into the living room, where an assembly line had been set up on the floor – fifteen paper bags with clown faces on them, fifteen packages of neat-looking barrettes (apparently, all the guests were going to be girls), fifteen sets of Magic Markers, fifteen tiny clip-on koala bears, fifteen candy bars, and fifteen beaded necklaces.

Boy, goody bags had certainly improved since I last got one. When we were little, didn’t goody bags just have, oh, peanuts and a pencil and maybe a plastic ring in them?

Let’s do a little Chapter Two here. Mallory is eleven years old in this book. The twins are having their eighth birthday party. That means that three years ago, Mallory was busy also being eight and attending eight-year-old birthday parties. I don’t think that society would change so drastically in three years that peanuts, a pencil, and a plastic ring being the goody bag standard to suddenly the standard being barrettes, koala bears, candy, markers, and necklaces. I mean, unless the society had a revolution/the ruling government collapsed in those three years, which Ann had never mentioned so I’m going to go out and a limb and say that a revolution had not happened in Stoneybrook.

Now, if Mallory was a baby-sitter in college, I would say that yes, this passage makes sense. I know of some fans who pretend the sitters are older when they read the books, because things just make more sense if you age the sitters by three years. I have a hard time believing that say, Haley Braddock, being only two years older than Mal and Jessi, would really respect them as much as she does (not counting the Haley of Claudia’s Little Liar, who respects no one). What is it about eleven that makes it the “adult” age in Stoneybrook? Are Mallory and Jessi just an exception? But then how does that explain things like chin-tipping?

This is making my brain hurt.