But I’ve started reading them recently, and maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up with them, as other people’s responses, the responses of those who did read them as children, are much more enthusiastic than my own. So far I’ve read Stage Fright, With You and Without You, and Missing Since Monday. I made an unsuccessful stab at Ten Kids, No Pets, but got bored, and plus I was reading a British or Australian edition* and trying to change all the “mum”s to “mom”s was irritating me. Stage Fright was ok, but nothing special, and I felt that the other two weren’t quite as deep, emotionally, as they should have been, considering their serious subject matter. And they both used dates with boys as the bandaid to the really terrible and tragic situations which occurred in the books, which seems odd to me. If my dad died or my little sister went missing, god forbid, I would be FLIPPING MY SHIT. The protagonists of these books seemed to almost take things in stride.

I still really want to read Slam Book. It seems so dark! But reading these early Ann books and comparing them with, say, Main Street (I haven’t read Belle Teal or A Corner of the Universe or any of her other recent books, but they seem to be doing well and winning awards so I assume that they’re pretty good books)… I can really see how Ann has grown and matured as a writer.

What do you think about Ann’s early books? Did you read them as a child or only as an adult or not at all?’

*sorry to my non-American friends, but I really hate reading BSC in non-American English!

It’s been a fairly long time since the BSC sections in the bookstores I frequent in the US disappeared. Have any of you spotted non-secondhand BSC books lately? Is Scholastic simply selling off dead stock–or are they still printing and selling them but only in international markets?

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 It’s not the out of date references that are the problem, either, in my opinion.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.

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.

OK. Amanda Lorber=Karen Brewer in high school, yes?

edit: for non-USA readers, here’s a link to where you can watch the show.

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.)

So in this book Stacey has these cool new friends, who are into things like nose jewelry and like to come over every day, watch MTV, and eat. Stacey’s mother thinks that it is time for Stacey to get a job. Hi, Mrs. McGill. Let me introduce you to a little something called “child labor laws.” (Paging the Rosebud Cafe.) There is very little for a thirteen-year-old to do except baby-sit, and as someone who was kicked out of the BSC, there aren’t really any baby-sitting jobs for Stacey to do. Stacey’s mom gets her a job at the Kid Center at Bellairs, which I kind of think is illegal, but moving on. Stacey’s cool new job gets her an employee discount, so her cool new friends use her and squeeze some money out of Bellairs, while also shoplifting paperback books. OMG.

All hell breaks loose when Stacey and her friends go to a U4Me concert. They sneak in miniature bottles of wine in their flop socks. Stacey and her new friends are no more. And Stacey doesn’t even get to see the one and only Aristotle Dukas in person. It’s very tragic.

Stacey is let back into the BSC. Good for her, I guess.

The one thing I don’t like about this book is the annoying subplot. Sharon Spier’s cousins are dropping off their six-year-old daughter for two weeks while they go to Europe. Um, yeah. Apparently the dad did not get along with Jack Schafer, so they were estranged or something. So these model parents are dropping off their daughter Amy with people she’s never seen before while they gallivant around Europe for two weeks. Obviously this does work out well, and Amy is really annoying and runs away to… the Bellairs Kid Center. Where Stacey happens to be working. It’s a bit awkward, since Stacey hasn’t made up with Dawn and Mary Anne. It’s hard to forgive a friend who spies on you from behind a jukebox.

One of the most notable things about this book is that it feels the most concurrent with its time, somehow. Now that Stacey has left the BSC, she is free to be a slightly more average teenager, so a lot of this book is filled with MTV-watching. There is talk of grunge, and flannel, and fashion that does not involve papier-mache. Stacey is hanging out with the cool kids, so we get to learn all about the mid-90s from a fashion perspective that does not inhaling paint fumes.

Stacey does not, however, live up to her sophisticated Chapter Two trait in this book. She dresses kind of dorky, bringing a white cardigan sweater to the U4Me concert. She also is hoodwinked by those “friends” of hers. Oh, Stacey. You’re the most sophisticated of the BSC, but it seems as if that is not a very large accomplishment.