There were many interesting responses to my last post. There was one in particular, however, for which I feel that my response merits its very own post, and not a comment in reply.

Rebecca wrote,

But anyway, I don’t think the books could be reprinted, not even if they were updated. It’s not the out of date references that are the problem, either, in my opinion. Young adult, and even middle grade, fiction these days is very… dramatic. It’s also pretty gritty. You have to be willing to really tackle tough issues and not balk at having characters talk the way real kids and teenagers talk, rather than using your characters to set positive examples. And AMM just didn’t do that with the BSC. They’re too squeaky clean and well rounded, with good, easy lives. It’s not the clothes or the lack of cell phones and email that date these books (although frankly, I don’t think such a club could exist now, in the age of online services), it’s the style of the writing. And that’s not a quick fix–that would necessitate a whole new series.

Now, granted, my only exposure to kids in middle school is high school is actually through the BSC fandom. Thus, I don’t have much of a handle on what is up with teens/preteens these days. But I do have two siblings currently enrolled in elementary school, so I know a fair amount about kids under ten and what they’re like and into. And this is why I disagree with Rebecca completely.

My first point is that the BSC is not intended for young adults, or even middle grade readers (which I’m assuming means middle schoolers). The BSC is written at a fourth-grade level, which means that many BSC readers are even younger than that. Nobody who has ever survived middle school would believe for a moment that the BSC is anything like real life. The BSC paints a fantasy of autonomy. In real life, middle schoolers in most places can’t or are not allowed to go anywhere without their parents driving them. Most parents also consider thirteen, let alone eleven, too young to baby-sit. Police departments usually don’t use middle schoolers as unpaid detectives. Awkward, shy girls don’t get to have hot boyfriends. Instead, boys make their lives hell. Nobody’s seventeen-year-old brother is very interested in driving around a bunch of middle school girls. They’re too busy trying to achieve their two main goals in life, getting beer and girls.

The other point I want to make is that entertainment aimed at or enjoyed by the age group that the BSC was written for is actually now LESS gritty and not at all irreverent than it was when I was in elementary school over a decade ago. Pete and Pete, Ren and Stimpy, the Simpsons–that’s what I was watching on TV. I liked grunge and alternative rock. That’s a far cry from the Hannah Montana-Magic Tree House-High School Musical stuff my sister likes, which is about as dangerous as dangerous as cotton candy. I would say that kids are even MORE sheltered today then they were a generation ago. And then when I was older, practically every YA book I read was about rape, drugs, or both, so I find it hard to believe that publishing trends have really gotten that much grittier.

Having just started a small fire in my kitchen while cooking rice, now seems like as good a time as any to stop my hiatus and return to posting here.

I have also been more absent than usual from my regular BSC-related internet activities, but not so absent that a shift in the fandom has passed me by. It’s a small shift, to be sure, barely perceptible except to those who have been around for a while and pay close attention. It used to be that I, born in 1986, was at the young end of the BSC fan spectrum. Perhaps this is just a natural part of life, that you used to be the baby and now you feel like a seasoned old-timer who should be retiring to Florida within the next couple of years, but now I can name a handful of people in the fandom, who are active and post on the boards and on the lj and on ff.net (illegally!) who were born in 1997. 1997!!!! In 1997 I was revelling in my angst and listening to silverchair! And of course, reading new BSC books, although I was already embarassed to be seen buying them in the bookstore.

And now we have new readers of the BSC, for whom the fashions of the late eighties and early 90s are as difficult to understand as the sanitary belt of the unupdated Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret was for our generation. But something still resonates with them, and they build their collections secondhand, not lucky enough to have been around when you could count on a new regular series every month, a new Mystery every other month, and a Super Special in the summer. They come online and discuss the books with us, bringing their currently-happening middle school experiences to the table.

I have long been a cynic when it comes to the question of reissuing the books or Ann writing a reunion book. A reunion book is something I just plain don’t really want, but a new print run I have always thought to be not particularly financially viable. The BSC was a huge series, and it’s just not conceivable that it would sell as well as it did at its peak to make printing them justifiable. And true, the graphic novels did not sell well enough to merit extending the series beyond the planned four books. But some kids aren’t into graphic novels, even though the BSC ones are awesome and I adore them. My sister, who is eight, didn’t want the graphic novels, but she wanted my regular books. I gave her my doubles, along with some other childhood favorites, and my dad said she “really loved the books,” so perhaps I have created another young BSC fan.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the BSC books would do well, well enough at least to republish the first 25 or so books. But one thing: no updating, like SVH. I think part of what makes BSC so popular is that it is from a relatively simpler time, without cell phones and before the internet had really taken hold. I liked books from before my time as a kid for this very reason. I loved reading about life in the early 1960s on the Upper West Side almost as much as I liked reading about Harriet M. Welsch herself. So please Scholastic, if you do rerelease the books, don’t trade in the Junk Bucket for a unnamed used Honda Civic, like what happened with poor 1BRUCE1.

Until I was about sixteen, I lived in my own head a lot, daydreaming about what I wanted to happen in my life. The BSC don’t seem to do that much, except in Chapter 2s where one of girls is riding their bicycle on the way to a meeting and thinking really, really hard about their friends and almost crashes into a telephone pole.

I suppose my tendency to drift into a fantasy world, especially when I was thirteen, was because I had no friends. Perhaps my tendency to fantasize had more to do with that than age. Perhaps the lack of daydreaming in the BSC (except for thinking about their awesome friends) has to do with their active social lives organizing carnivals for children and having sort-of boyfriends.

But then when I really think about it, it’s Claudia and Stacey, the coolest (arguably) members of the BSC, who daydream the most. My favorite fantasy sequence in BSC, the one that inspired this whole post, is the one in Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls where Claudia imagines a situation where she and Trevor are on a field trip to a place with a garden maze, and they find a secret door in the garden and it turns into a winter wonderland and it is very romantic. It is exactly the kind of stupid thing I would have imagined at that age. I also like it because it seems like it would lead into a very strange magical pornographic film.

Stacey usually dreams about future careers and money, so hers aren’t as funny. Stacey in a red convertible! Stacey the famous movie director!

Do I just have a selective memory? Did the other girls daydream more frequently than I remember? Was I just a loser nerd with no friends? (Yes.)

The reason why I’ve been slacking off on posting lately is because I have a lot of work to do before I graduate in May, and it’s difficult for me to sit down and ponder long enough to come up with something to post about. So I decided that until my graduation, I’d try a new format and post my thoughts of a specific BSC book. Regular posting will resume before the end of May.

First up is Kristy’s Great Idea. As well as the first book in the series, it is the first BSC I read. I got it in a set of three from the Collector’s Club with Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls and The Truth About Stacey at the end of first grade. I guess you could make the case that this is the book that got me hooked, but, truth be told, I don’t think that it would have mattered how much I actually enjoyed the book. I was so in love with the idea of reading the BSC that the quality of the book didn’t matter. It just seemed like such a grown-up thing to me, especially since my mom had to use my brother’s Scholastic book club form to enroll me.

As I’ve mentioned before on this site, I actually enjoy the later books more than the early books. They just have a different feel to them. While it’s cute to see them forming the club and everything, it feels very different from the later books. Plus it’s always strange to see the girls in seventh grade rather than eighth, and having Mal be a sittee rather than a sitter. I think that KGI is probably the most realistic book of the entire series, and I think we lose some of the Thomas family closeness later on. Plus, you don’t really see the sitters mouth off to their parents and teachers in later books like you do in this book, which I appreciate.

Hmm, maybe I like this book more than I thought I did!

Next up, in case you’d like to read along with me: Dawn and the We <3 Kids Club.

Yeah, I know, wrong holiday, but… it’s something which has been weighing on my mind. I posted about it on the boards, but i felt it was worth repeating here.

In LS, there are several Easter-themed books. There’s Karen’s Bunny and Karen’s Easter Parade out of the ones I’ve read. In BSC, though, there is absolutely no mention of Easter. In none of the the springtime books is it ever mentioned.

This is surprising for a couple of reasons. One, an Easter Egg Hunt seems like something that Kristy would love to organize. Two, they celebrate all of the other major holidays–Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, Halloween, and yes, Christmas–several times. I suppose that you could argue that Christmas in the US is more secular than Easter in the US, but if you were going to use that argument, then why is Easter mentioned in LS?

Is LS, for whatever reason, more religiously-focused than BSC?

For some reason, my college is more willing to let us off for snow than my high school was. Too bad I am out of hot chocolate.

I would really like to cuddle up with Snowbound! but sadly I don’t have it here, either real or ebook form. This brings me to a question: did the BSC ever have a snow day except in Snowbound? I can’t recall any.

I’m not talking about the kind of spoilers where one finds out the ending of a tv show/movie/book before they watch or read it. When it comes to the BSC, I don’t really believe in spoilers anymore–no new book has come out for such a long time that in the fandom I believe it’s assumed that all involved know all the plots, and won’t cry the way some people do when they see a still from the “Sex and the City” movie posted on a gossip blog. No, I’m talking about once you’ve pretty much made your way through the series and start to go back and read books from earlier on, and get all bummed out because you know that the future will be bad for a certain character.

For instance, Mimi and Louie. It is impossible to read a book where either of these characters or alive without thinking about how they will soon be dead. It’s also impossible to read a book where Stacey’s parents are still married without thinking of their divorce, or to read about Dawn merrily living in Stoneybrook when everyone knows it will not be long before her character is totally assassinated and she slinks back to California.

For me, the worst of all of these spoilers occurred when The Fire At Mary Anne’s House was published. Throughout the series, Mary Anne and Dawn’s house was sort of the “event headquarters” for the BSC. Claud’s room was where they held their meetings, but the barn and backyard was where all the carnivals/talent shows/camps/every other annoying baby-sitting subplot happened. I understand the artistic merit (for lack of a better term) for having the house burn down in the last non-”Friends Forever” book. Not only does it provide a catalyst for Mary Anne to dump Logan (yay!) and also start to grow up and assert herself more, and shows us more some really interesting Spier family drama, it is symbolic. When Mary Anne’s house burned down, their default location for Kristy’s Great Ideas also burned down. Priorities had to shift. The girls had to accept that like Stacey discovered in the “Bad Girl” arc but then forgot once Kristy allowed her to rejoin, there has to be life beyond BSC.

The only person who seemed really upset about the house was Jeff. Jeff was, after all, not yet eleven and therefore still a child. All of the adults seemed excited about a new start. Perhaps Sharon and Richard were secretly glad that they would no longer feel obligated to host day camps on their property.

So yes, I respect this artistic decision and feel that it does provide a good foundation for the Friends Forever series. Yet it still kind of bums me out whenever I read about the barn or Mary Anne and Dawn’s farmhouse, just because I have foreknowledge that the characters do not and I know that the world as they know it will drastically change.