Reading the BSC often requires a suspension of disbelief. The shy, mousy girl getting the guy (pre-makeover, even!), middle school girls of diverse personality and interests and social standing being the best of friends, thirteen-year-olds being entrusted with the care of infants–if you started to list everything about the BSC that wasn’t realistic, you’d be listing for a long time. The most glaring logic problem in the series, though, is obviously the Stoneybrook Time Warp. How many Christmases, Summer Vacations, and Valentine’s Days can you have and still never make it out of eighth grade?
This bothers some readers. They wish they could have seen the girls experience high school, and all the challenges that brings. A series that comes to mind that displays a different model of dealing with time is the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. We start with Alice in elementary school (granted, the three prequels came out long after I’d be interested in reading about an elementary schooler, so my Alice knowledge begins with The Agony of Alice), and I’ve read that once Alice graduates from high school, Naylor plans to write a book about Alice’s life through middle age. Unlike the BSC’s rigorous publishing schedule in the 90s, Alice books come out once a year or so. The reader, I suppose, might pick up the earlier books in their elementary school library, and then discover the more YA Alice books in middle school and early high school. Alice ages along with her target audience. As her readers get more mature, so do Alice’s experiences and perspective.
Some would have liked to see a similar model for the BSC. Spend 50 books or so in the eighth grade, then move the girls up to ninth. I, personally, am not in this camp. I don’t even want to see a reunion book. Keeping the girls in the eighth grade allows the books to maintain a certain innocence and element of escapism. Although I suppose that in real life, eighth grade is less innocent than appears in the BSC (the most scandalous thing in the books is some tiny wine bottles hidden in push-down socks), it is believeable to maintain a lack of real-world issues as long as the girls are still in middle school.
In California Diaries, although four of the five core characters are also 13-year-old eighth graders, the move to the high school building alone makes for a more serious, mature series, which deals with tougher issues is a more realistic way than the BSC ever does. In BSC, when they do tackle serious issues (outside of divorce and death), they’re happening to someone not in the Club. It’s a friend, a neighbor, a client. The core characters are only observers. In California Diaries, it’s Maggie, it’s Amalia, it’s Ducky, it’s Sunny. Only Dawn remains a passive observer. Perhaps she brought an amulet with her from Connecticut to keep these things from happening directly to her. Regardless, the mere setting change from middle school to high school brings about a whole new set of questions, even though they’re still eighth graders.
Too much would have had to happen to let the BSC mature from eighth grade to ninth. Probably certain elements of the Club would have been rated as socially undesirable by other, more popular elements. A wider world would have meant new friends and new experiences, which would have shaken the Club to the core and probably rendered it unable to exist. By keeping the Club in an eighth grade purgatory, it allowed the publishers to churn out stories for fourteen years, without ever having to demonstrate real maturity or growth. Which is just fine, because that’s exactly what people wanted from the BSC. It wasn’t a series that you were supposed to read for ten years; I would say that most read for one or two and then moved on to something else. They didn’t need to mature with their readers, the way Alice does.
I have to say that I prefer the Time Warp model for the BSC. It takes you to a place removed from the troubles and stresses of everyday life. Ahh, the idyllic suburb of Stoneybrook. Even with counterfeiters and jewel thieves and psychotic fans running around, it still manages to retain its bucolic quality.
