*****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.

One of the major themes of the series is thirteen as a turning point, the age where one is Grown Up. You can baby-sit at night. You can go steady. You don’t ask your parents for help in 95% of the cases where you really, really should. Mallory and Jessi see thirteen as the magic age where they will get sparkly sweatshirts, contacts, and nose jobs. Shannon Kilbourne even titles the essay that frames her portion of the The Baby-Sitters Remember “Thirteen,” which is a sort-of coming of age story.

Apart from the whole “no sitting at night” thing, Mallory and Jessi actually have a fair amount of autonomy for eleven year olds, especially by today’s Helicopter Parents standard. How many eleven year olds do you know, for instance, who go to New York City to visit a boyfriend? How many eleven year olds are allowed to spend a weekend baby-sitting their siblings? (Sorry, Jessi, but I have to agree with Aunt Cecelia on that one. That’s just plain illegal.)

So one would assume that, despite all the whining from Mal and Jessi, that being eleven in Stoneybrook doesn’t really suck that much. Parents are more than lenient. Despite the fact that the Pikes have nixed the nose job idea, Mallory has more independence than would be considered prudent by commentors on parenting blogs, even the “hip” ones. But the same cannot be said for Mallory and Jessi’s peers. It is, in fact, one of the great mysteries of the BSC.

When we are first introduced to their characters, Tiffany Kilbourne is a sitter and Ben Hobart is Mallory’s Australian doppelganger/boyfriend. (Kind of creepy, if you ask me.) Yet somehow, over the course of the series, they are both on the receiving end of maturity downgrades. Rather than being pissed that the BSC has stolen her and Shannon’s sitting “territory,” Tiffany becomes part of the territory and becomes a BSC client. And Ben shows up at events that the BSC are running/involved with, and there is no mention of the fact that Ben and Mallory go out sometimes.

Sometime after December 1994 (Ben and Mallory have a fight about carolling in SS12), Ben and Mal’s relationship fizzles out. Perhaps all of the fighting about carolling and card catalog usage got to him. He shows up at the Greenbrook Club bathing cap contest. He plays an innkeeper in the church Christmas pageant and pisses off Mallory because he adlibs some Faux-stralian flavor into his lines. There is never any mention that hey, at one time, Ben and Mallory might have looked deeply into each other’s glasses and held each other’s sweaty palms. No, all has been forgotten–the scars from those card catalog/carolling fights go too deep. He is excised from Mal’s Chapter Two segments. The first cut is the deepest, indeed.

Ben has a chance to redeem himself after Mal’s Spaz Girl nervous breakdown, however. He is seen saying that he has tried to reach out to Mallory, but she doesn’t seem very receptive. No, Ben, your flames of love died out long ago. It happened while you were decorating your bathing cap to look like a shark attack.

Tiffany Kilbourne never gets a similar shot of redemption. She becomes a client and stays a client. Sometimes, I think, her age is even downgraded to ten. She’s eleven in The Complete Guide, but I swear she’s mentioned as ten in some places. Anyone with a citation, hit me up in the comments.

Then, in Claudia and the Recipe for Danger, we actually have a twelve-year-old pretty much being sat for by the eleven and thirteen-year-old sitters. He is the second Tyler in the Kids Kitchen thing, and no one ever really notes WHY there’s a twelve-year-old there, and he doesn’t do much. But it’s still alarming.

My conclusion is that really, Mal and Jessi seem to be the only eleven-year-olds in Stoneybrook who are afforded such responsibility. Perhaps if Ben had been smart like Logan (never thought I’d type the phrase “smart like Logan,” BUT SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME, GHOSTWRITERS?!), and become an associate member, he could have kept his lady and his adult-ish status. It seems like being in the BSC is the ticket to maturity, and will help you avoid all of the potential pitfalls of adolescence, like acne, gum-chewing, trying cigarettes, and hiding those tiny bottles of wine in your flop socks. Look at what happened to Stacey and Dawn once they leave the comforting bosom of the BSC for Bad Girl-ism and California! Would Dawn have gone to a restaurant that served “more than just tea” (AKA HEAD SHOP IN THE BACK, DUDES) if she were still living with Mary Anne? Of course not.

The time warp works in mysterious ways. It can make you age so that you seem ahead of your years (everyone in the BSC). It can make you age backwards (Tiffany and Ben). Stoneybrook, Connecticut. An idyllic suburb of Stamford, a convenient train ride away from New York City straight into the heart of… THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

UPDATE: Not even bodily injury can stop Ashley from sharing her vast BSC knowledge. Thank you, Ashley!:

From #70, Stacey and the Cheerleaders:
Shannon nodded. “She missed the Terrible Twos. Instead she’s having the Terrible Tens. Even her teachers are complaining.” (p.23)
AND
Tiffany is a ten-year-old version of Shannon - physically, at least. (p.60)

But in #112, Kristy and the Sister War, Tiffany is 11 again, though she is still getting sat for.

Thanks to super sleuth BooBooBrewer, here is a link to a cracked-out video by Peter Lerangis, where he spends most of the video talking in a Russian accent, pretending to be some guy named Ivan Kulik. Honestly, Peter Lerangis sounds and acts exactly like you’d expect Peter Lerangis to sound and act.

Peter Lerangis is kind of a controversial topic among BSC fans, I think. It is generally pretty obvious when he is the ghostwriter. He is found of sound effects, and puns, and you usually feel like the sitter missed her dose of ritalin that day. I happen to enjoy Peter, and I think he does Claudia and Kristy’s voices especially well–his sense of humor meshes well with their characters. But some people just find him irritating, or think that his style is too obvious and distracting. What do you think of PL?

One of the main complaints about later BSC is that so many talents are exaggerated. Jessi becomes an INTERNATIONAL PRIMA BALLERINA. Mallory is no longer just a girl who writes stories about mice wearing high-tops, she’s a future best-selling author. Stacey is better at math than anyone else in Connecticut. In the beginning, before ghostwriters, fans argue, Jessi was just a girl who liked to dance and didn’t want to go pro. Dawn would sometimes eat a piece of cake, provided she had a toothbrush handy.

I don’t often reread the earlier BSC books. The later ones, for me, capture the flavor and time of my childhood and hold more nostalgic appeal. Sure, I’ll agree that the writing quality goes a little downhill (but I stick out my tongue at all of the Peter Lerangis haters), but I don’t read BSC for quality writing. I simply just don’t get the urge to reread the early books all that often.

Well, lately, I’ve been in an early book mood. I recently reread Jessi’s Secret Language, and I really think that it invalidates the above argument for why the earlier books are better. Let’s review.

Jessi’s Secret Genuisness
Now, if Jessi were a member of the Glass family, this book might be believable. We’re told at the beginning that Jessi is good at languages. But there’s a difference betweeen “being good at languages” and “being a savant.” Jessi begins sitting for the Braddocks, Mrs. Braddock hands her a dictionary and shows her the sign for “bathroom,” and suddenly Jessi is able to have competent, complicated conversations.

As somebody who spends a lot of my life dealing with learning and teaching foreign languages, this made me shake my head. ASL has a different grammar than English. There are no synonyms or cognates, because you don’t use speech. You absolutely have to learn every sign individually. Even the best student can’t say as much as Jessi was saying in ASL after a few classes of Spanish I, and Jessi wasn’t even taking classes. And everyone else in Stoneybrook seemed to be learning just as fast.

Either Ann has never learned a foreign language in her life (although for some reason I recall her studying a few semesters of French…?) or she, too, is a real genius.

2. Jessi Ramsey, Best Dancer Ever
The subplot in this book, which mainly exists for Jessi to do a Really Nice Thing for Matt Braddock, is the production of Coppelia that is going on at Jessi’s dance school. Now, just so you don’t get confused, Jessi’s not just in the corps or something. No, Jessi is freaking SWANILDA. Now, the school only seems to go up to age 14, so MAYBE it could be believable that they’d cast an eleven-year-old–but I still doubt it. But the really unbelievable thing is that Jessi has time to become fluent in sign language AND star in a ballet AND go to school AND do other baby-sitting. It’s being a star or the kids, Jessi. Choose one.

I guess that what bothers me about both of these things is that they’re so… unnecessary, I guess? Jessi could have arranged the show for Matt even if she was a dancer in the corps. She also could have had the same “introducing Matt to the kids and learning some signs” plot without becoming practically fluent in three days. I’m just not sure what the point of making Jessi so AMAZING was.

Here’s a comment from mella2750 that I got recently that I found interesting:

Be forewarned if you do go! I was in charge of the author signings at Book Expo a few years ago, and Ann was there. I talked to her and she signed her then-new book, but she did NOT want to talk about the BSC. When I brought it up, her eyes narrowed and she looked away, and I backed off. Maybe she was having an off day, but be prepared!

I recall reading in an interview that Ann felt that she was more well-known now for her post-BSC books than the BSC. That had always struck me as wishful thinking on her part. Sure, her books have been well-received and she’s won numerous awards, and Main Street has been doing well enough for Scholastic to justify its continued existence. Still, for those of us who were active readers of middle grade books for girls between 1986-2000, and perhaps for people who are younger but discovered the books in libraries or had older siblings, Ann M. Martin’s name will conjure up the BSC before anything else.

Now, obviously the BSC isn’t the most high-quality fare out there. And while I haven’t read any of her post-BSC stand alone novels, Main Street is of markedly higher quality than BSC. But still. The revenue from BSC has given Ann a lot in life. I’m interested by this response from Ann, from her unwillingness to be associated with BSC.

Thoughts?

If anybody in the BSC thinks about doing something even remotely non-kosher, Kristy Thomas is there to wail about the potential fate of the Club. Mary Anne brings Logan over to play with Jake Kuhn? We’re RUINED! Stacey gets accused of stealing a ring–we’ll go out of business!

But like Bernie Madoff carefully making sure that everything in his office was arranged perfectly while he was busy defrauding people of billions of dollars, beneath Kristy’s superior, moralistic exterior lies a person who has made some pretty big mistakes in her life. What would Mrs. Newton, who fired a sitter for smoking a cigarette (a big sin in Stoneybrook), think if she knew that Kristy had a hand in graffiti-ing the equipment shed?

Stacey, while kind of having a rep has the resident Bad Girl of the BSC, turned down the alcohol at the concert. She followed her mother’s mildly illogical rule about staying in the kitchen with boys. Kristy thought that her mom and Watson’s rule about no significant others didn’t apply to her and Bart. As an athlete, she refused the offer of a cigarette, but she had few qualms about grabbing a can of spray paint to feel like part of a team.

And when Mary Anne needed to sneak out of her house in Mary Anne’s Revenge, who instructed her on how to do it? Not Claudia. Not Dawn, who has been involved in sneaking away to head shops/tea places in California. Nope, it’s Kristy who helps her out.

What should be made of Kristy’s dual nature? Is it that special kind of self-sabotage that is often found in great leaders, like talented and intelligent politicians who just can’t help themselves when it comes to adultery? Or does she simply not hold herself accountable to her own moral standards?

Within the fandom, people who like Karen Brewer are few and far between. Usually, when a character is unpopular among readers, it’s on purpose: the character was written to be unpopular, to provide a foil and a challenge to the more positive characters of the novel. This is not the case with Karen Brewer, though. It’s a well-known fact that Ann is a big fan of Karen–enough of a fan, in fact, to give Karen her own series.

So if the author loves her, why do so many fans hate Karen? I know that for me, personally, it’s because I don’t like kids very much at all, and the kids I can tolerate are of the quiet, seen-and-not-heard variety. Noisy Karen, who needs attention and is always correcting everyone and making up stupid stories and demanding that everyone play with her? Not my kind of kid. But obviously some people do like children for the most part, and still hate Karen. Now, in lots of other children’s books, I like precocious, loquacious, mischievious kids. Pippi. Eloise. But Karen seems to view the world in such rigid standards (No, you CANNOT say something that way!) that she just comes off as abrasive. And I suppose that like with many parents with terribly annoying children, Ann, as Karen’s parent, loves her more than anybody else is capable of.

What are your thoughts? Why do you think Karen is so unpopular if Ann loves her so?

There are certain things which happen with regularity in children’s series about middle schoolers aimed at young girls that do not really happen in real life all that often. Here is a but a short list, culled from readings of The Baby-Sitters Club and GirlTalk. Other tropes or other series/tv shows in which these things happen are welcome and encouraged in the comments.

Modeling.
Since there is usually at least one main character who breathtakingly beautiful (while also being intelligent and modest), modeling is a good, exciting plot to turn to. Because what young girl doesn’t want to be judged solely on her looks? GirlTalk blew this wad early, in the third book of the series, The New You. Allison Cloud models after being selected in a Belle modeling search. She could have gone on to have a real modeling career, but the she wouldn’t have time to read 100 books over summer vacation.

Stacey was so pretty that Scholastic felt justified in using this plot twice. The first was in the tv show, where Stacey was selected to model for Bellair’s and also could have gone on to have a big career, but chose baby-sitting instead. Much more glamorous. Then in Stacey and the Fashion Victim, she participates in Stoneybrook’s Fashion Week. Yeah.

Another important plot point is that the only other girl in the modeling group that your modeling character knows is the sworn enemy of the series’ main clique. Stacy Hansen in GT, Cokie Mason in BSC. They’re bitches, and they’re beautiful.

A fun twist to this plot is that in Stacey and the Bad Girls, Stacey is rejected as a model, for being “too commercial.” What, perms aren’t edgy?!

Beauty Pageants.
When I think of beauty pageants, I think of Delta Burke and Bravo’s series Toddlers and Tiaras. And the South. But in middle grade girls’ fiction, geography knows no bounds. Every town has a beauty pageant, and every girl wants to enter. Now, since sometimes the BSC takes on a feminist slant, in the BSC beauty pageant plot, it’s clients who are entering, and Mal and Jessi form the beauty pageant opposition.

But in the GirlTalk book Beauty Queens, Allison and Sabrina both enter and it’s a big fucking deal and stuff. I don’t remember what Allison’s talent was–reading? I think Sabrina gets Miss Congeniality. Whatever. I haven’t read that book in ten years.

Synchronized Swimming.
Have you ever done synchronized swimming? No? Well, in middle school book girl world, schools have synchronized swimming teams. Wtih costumes. And underwater stereo systems. Perhaps there were editors out there with Esther Williams fantasies. Again, it’s our Allison who does this sport, in Allison, Shape Up!. Jessi, our ballerina, gets this plot in Jessi’s Gold Medal. Of course, these girls take to “synchro” (that’s what the cool kids call it) and win medals and shit. But because it’d be too boring a plot to include in chapter 2s, no matter how good at synchro-ing your heroine is, it’s always a one-book deal.

Horseback Riding.
According to movies and tv shows and books, before girls love boys, they love horses. Randy, because she likes to be surprising, had this plot in GirlTalk. Surprisingly, it was a multi-book arc for her. The other girls tried it, but sucked. Mallory also tried it, and naturally sucked. Mallory and the Dream Horse is easily one of the most snarkable books of the series. Who can forget Mallory, dressed like she is from the 1965 Sears and Roebuck catalog, hanging out at a cool rich kid’s birthday party where everyone else is dressed like they are auditioning for “Kids Incorporated”?

Poor Mom, Rich New Dad.
Is your mom a harried, overworked, lonely single mother? Have no fear, because soon a really rich dude will walk into her life, marry her after like a week of dating, and soon you will all be moving to an awesome mansion, which you will have to share with your new stepsiblings. If you’re a main character in a middle grade book series, at least. Both Katie Campbell and Kristy Thomas watched as their moms were swept off their feet, and soon they had to leave the little houses they had known all their lifes for mansions. Oh noes. Katie’s new stepdad’s mansion is way cooler than Watson’s, if you didn’t read GirlTalk. It has an elevator, an indoor pool, and is fully staffed. I want to go to there.

As astute reader Sadako pointed out, Ann will be at BookExpo in NYC on Friday, May 29th, signing books from 3-3:30.

I like to check out Ann’s website every once in a while. She doesn’t update all that frequently–maybe once every two or three months–so it’s a nice surprise when there’s something new.

It has been updated for April, with a 25 Random Things post. Sound familiar? In this missive, we learn that Ann (gasp!) likes I Love Lucy and salmon–I thought she was a vegetarian? Maybe she just doesn’t eat red meat.

About this list, Ann writes,

If you’re familiar with the Internet (and since you’re reading this online, you probably are!), a lot of questionnaires, quizzes, and polls may have come your way. I’ve definitely seen my fair share of these, but nothing had caught my eye until a friend sent me her “25 Random Thoughts.”

She then talks about how much fun she’s been having reading her friends’ lists. Now, it’s entirely possible that maybe her friends are just emailing her this stuff. But questionnaires? Quizzes? Polls? It’s pretty obvious that Ann has a facebook account. And sits around doing quizzes like “Which Wizard of Oz character are you?” and posting them to her news feed.

Peter Lerangis has a facebook page. And Ann has an official page, so you can be her fan. But I bet that her real facebook page, where she posts pictures of her dog and her latest sewing projects, is hidden. Smart lady, that Ann.