Stacey and the Missing Ring is a book I misplaced years ago. I had always wanted to reread it, because although I remembered that Stacey was accused of stealing a ring and everything and the people she stole it from were pretty fancy, I didn’t really remember much else.

Well, I got a chance to reread it a few days ago. Usually, I’m a big Stacey supporter. When other people talk shit about her, I defend her. I can often relate to her better than most of the other characters. But in this book, the girl is just spoiled. She demands that her mother buy her a diamond ring!!!!!!!! At 13!!!!!!!!! (LUCA VOICE!) She thinks that her mother is TOTALLY UNFAIR to not want to buy her this ring, and insists that her dad totally would, making her mom feel shitty for having less money than her dad. I mean, usually when people are all, “Stacey is a bitch,” I can see where Stacey’s coming from. But this “BUY ME A DIAMOND RING” thing seems pretty out of left field for Stacey, who totally could have had that purple suede fringe jacket from Betsey Johnson (I can just imagine the price tag! More evidence that Mr. McGill=up there with Watson Brewer in terms of wealth), but went with sunglasses instead. And here she is just so spoiled and demanding.

Of course, this whole diamond ring-thing is plot device to make Stacey seem suspicious. While coincidences like that happen all the time in everyday life, in fiction they seem contrived. Another thing that seems contrived is the “OMG NO ONE IS CALLING US BECAUSE OF SOMETHING BAD A SITTER DID,” which also happened in Mary Anne Breaks the Rules. No guys, everyone just randomly went on vacation!!

Another thing that sucks about this book: the Gardellas are wacky! They love their pets more than their daughter! Yet this whole plot point never goes anywhere. No sign of the crazy for real, just “oh look, the cat eats on the table, ho-hum.” What a waste of comic potential! They could have at least had some weird crazy secret or something.

Also, there is no real subplot of this book. Just a sort-of rehashing of the Phantom Caller plot, where the girls get scared while baby-sitting. Jessi robber-proofs the house.

I feel like that for the first branded mystery, they should have done something… better. Not just Stacey being spoiled and stuff that happens multiple other times in the series–although in defense of The Powers That Be, Mary Anne Breaks the Rules was published later. But it still feels like “Well, this aspect of the plot has certainly been done to death in other books in the series.” Overall, it was just disappointing. It may rank up there in the pantheon of my all-time, least favorite BSC books.

Has there ever been a BSC book that you haven’t read in a long time, and were super excited to reread, and then it just fell completely flat?

I know, I know–this blog is basically turning into “Greer Bitches About How Dumb Mysteries Are” dot com. BUT THEY REALLY ARE DUMB.

Today I read Dawn and the Disappearing Dogs. The premise is that one of the wealthiest men in Stoneybrook is no longer so wealthy, so he’s taken to stealing purebred dogs to maintain his lavish lifestyle. This is dumb for many reasons:

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

Yesterday I reread Kristy and the Haunted Mansion. It is not a book I have read many times. I wasn’t sure why, before I read it again. Despite the presence of Karen Brewer, the idea of sleeping over in a creepy old house seems kind of neat, looking at all of the old crap in the house, all of it perfectly preserved. And then I got to the end and I realized why I hated it.

And this is where you should stop reading if you haven’t gotten a chance to read this book in the sixteen years since it’s been published.

So the caretaker guy, Will Blackburn, was so heartbroken that nearly sixty years later he was living on his ex-girlfriend’s property, keeping up all of her things, which is actually really creepy. You know, it’s sad that his first love died and all, but really he should have done something to get over it. He should have fought in World War II or something and gotten over it. Seriously. Are we meant to believe that his girlfriend died, his girlfriend’s dad died, and then he just bought this huge mansion on his own? I guess he must have made money while pining away for her after her death or something. But that’s beside the point–basically you have this dude, who never got with anyone else, never had kids, never seemed to really do anything in his life because his fiancee died in 1937…

AND SHE WAS WORKING IN A SEWING SHOP IN STONEYBROOK. AFTER TRAVELING THE WORLD AND BEING AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN SUPERSTAR.

Despite the fact that Dorothy’s actions killed her father and destroyed Will’s life, basically (although OK, I can see the argument that Will not moving on with his life is totally not her fault; he chose the path he followed, I guess), she is presented as a positive character in the book. She’s a nice old lady who bucked convention and had a great, feminist-empowerment life. I do understand why she did it, I suppose–not wanting to go from her dad’s house to her husband’s house–but, you know, she could have just met Will and said “I am not ready for marriage” and then gone off to Paris or whatever. She didn’t have to let everyone believe she was DEAD.

And what is the BSC’s reaction? “Oh, let’s reunite them! How romantic!” No, all you Mary Anne Spiers of the world, she’s just not that into him. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have faked her death to get away from him. Plus, how will poor Will feel, when his sixty-years-presumed-dead-fiancee-who-jilted-him shows up at his door? Dude’s gonna have a heart attack. Then he is going to be really, really pissed off.

In conclusion, this book is just all kinds of messed up and sends a weird message.

It always confused me why Jessi and Mallory only had one mystery each. After some lengthy discussion on the top at the BSC boards, I finally found the answer. Jessi and Mallory, at eleven years old, were simply too young to participate in any of the dangerous crime-solving that the much older thirteen-years-old sitters were doing. Even in the Super Mysteries where Mal and Jessi have chapters, i can’t recall them doing any real stakeouts or anything–just keeping the mystery notebook up to date or doing some library research. Despite the total disregard for safety throughout this spinoff, such as the fact that even when someone tries to burn someone’s house down Claudia doesn’t bother to tell her parents about the scary stuff that’s happening to the BSC, at least they left the young’uns out of it.

Last night I read Mary Anne and the Secret in the Attic. This is an significant Baby-sitters Club book, as it introduces a very important part of Mary Anne’s biography. After her mother’s death, Mary Anne was sent to Maynard, Iowa to live with her grandparents for a while, until Richard fought to get her back. Future BSC books would occasionally list the state as Nebraska, rather than Iowa, but it was definitely Iowa.

Obviously, in terms of Mary Anne character development, this is a pivotal book. Sadly, it is full of glaring holes and mistakes and just plain sloppy writing. Perhaps most confusing is Mary Anne’s trip to Iowa, which we learn about through her correspondence with her family and friends back in Stoneybrook. The last line before this chapter-of-handwriting is “It was time for me to make plans to go to Maynard, Iowa.” Then we turn the page and with no transition, MA is having a great time in Maynard. Mary Anne, however, was in school throughout the whole book and she seems to spend a long time in Iowa. At the end, Richard writes a letter about how Mary Anne would like to visit her again next summer. This leads to the conclusion that the last chapter of the book takes place the summer after the other events of the book, but again, this passage of time is not clear. Richard also invites Verna Baker (MA’s grandmother) to come for Christmas. That never happens.

The story of MA’s visit to Iowa is told fully in Mary Anne’s Book. It paints a much less rosy portrait of her visit than this book. For most of the time MA and Verna are not getting along and it is only at the end that they begin to like and relate to one another. I suppose that the story about her trip told by Mary Anne in the mystery book is much less interesting than in the Portrait, and in 1992 they perhaps had not planned the Portrait Collection series yet, so this is something I’m willing to overlook.

What I cannot overlook is what is truly the most WTF?! moment in the book. Mary Anne, supposedly a loyal girlfriend, continues her Sea City tradition in Iowa and goes on a date with a cute Farmer Bob. She does not say, oh well my Grandma made me go, or anything to that effect. She just says he’s cute. I can understand being bored after only hanging out with your grandma all the time, but if you have a steady boyfriend back home, you should not paint your activity as a date. Mary Anne was then disappointed that Bob, who took her to the Dairy Queen, was only interested in cars and cows. What does it matter, Mary Anne? You have a BOYFRIEND! God. MA is worse than Stacey sometimes.

Another problem with this book is this big paint fight they have while painting their cardboard cutouts for Heritage Day. While Mary Anne and Dawn’s house has a freaking BARN, they decide that the logical place to undertake a messy project would be… the den. This makes absolutely no sense. In a choice between a room which the family uses often and probably has expensive electronic equipment and perhaps important things like uber-romantic high school yearbooks and things like that, and a barn that no one cares whether you get it messy or not, they choose… the den. Well, anyway, they have this big paint fight. It is so messy that Logan has to take off his shirt. While they mention covering the floors with newspapers, they don’t mention the furniture or the other stuff in the room that I assume includes a television set. Also, it is specifically stated in several books that unlike Stacey’s mom, who allows boyfriends in the kitchen when she is not home, Richard and Sharon have an explicitly-stated “no boys in the house when we’re not home” rule. Mary Anne’s dad doesn’t even flinch when she relays this event to him, even when she mentions the “no shirt” thing. (Sexy!)

This last annoying, sloppy writing mistake is not terribly important but might be the most annoying and stupid. Charlotte Johanssen’s great-grandmother, Berit Marie Hjielholt Johanssen, emigrated from Denmark to the US. Her diary, which details her life starting from her voyage to America. Now, since it has never been mentioned before, I doubt that Charlotte reads Danish fluently. I doubt even more that Berit would have written her diary in English, given that she was Danish. But Charlotte can read this diary. My grandparents immigrated and even after years and years and living here they still wrote personal things in their native tongue. Has Ellen Miles mistakenly thought that Denmark was a part of England, like a Scotland with lax marijuana laws and more herring? It is hard to tell. Perhaps she is one of the one-fifth of Americans who cannot locate even the United States on a world map. Such as.