The Baby Sitters' Club Series

[susyhomewrecker]

Bad Mallory! Bad!

Man, I would not want to be BFFs a year later with a girl who smacked me down over a brownie! I always thought it was so odd that the whole club considered themselves best friends, while Mallory and Jessi were two years younger!

[linared]

I actually had a 11 year old friend when I was 13 and I quickly figured out it was a bad idea. Also everyone, my parents, her parents, other friends, thought it was very strange that we were friends. So I think it is unrealistic that these younger girls would get to spend time with the older girls. I could especially see Claudia or Stacey being embarrassed by having to hang out with the babies.

[carrier76]

I put masking tape on the back of the books, so I could write the due date (I didn't have one of those cool stamper things.) I also "scanned" them with the gun from my brother's Nintendo Duck Hunt game, which really did nothing but make me feel important.

I used to play library by myself too! I had a Shirt Tales stamper, and that was my "library stamp." If you go back and look at all of my old Little Golden Books, there will be "Cindy" "Susie," etc. written in them w/ a Shirt Tales stamp.

What the hell kind of name is Marnie?!?!!?

I loved "Mary Ann takes charge." I read that one over and over again. I also loved "Kristy's Big Day" and would obsess about how they split up the kids' groups.

Also in that book....David tells somebody else "May the force by with you!" instead of "be with you," and it bugged me big time.

[susyhomewrecker]

carrier76 said:

What the hell kind of name is Marnie?!?!!?

HA, I remember asking my dad that exact same question when I first read the book. His response? "Uh...it's from a Hitchcock movie, I think." Which to a 7 year old means nothing. Stupid name.

[mafiaangel]

So what was the point that made everyone walk away from reading BSC?

It wasn't so much an age issue with me. I remember being 11 or 12 and just realizing one day while reading one of the books that in the 100s, that I just couldn't stand Kristy or most of the girls anymore. I couldn't understand who would want to be friendly with them.

That and I got tired of reliving 6th/8th grade for the umpteenth time.

The California Diaries were cool though because they were a bit more "angsty" and not so sugar-coated.

[Deleted]

mafiaangel said:

So what was the point that made everyone walk away from reading BSC?

I just started reading more "grown up" books. I found an old Dick Francis book at my grandma's house and got hooked on mysteries and other books longer than 100-125 pages. I stopped reading BSC in the early 30s.

Same w/ SVH. Stopped at about the 50s.

[polygal]

I stopped reading right around Book 100 (although I wished I'd waited the series out and finished it, since there only ended up being 30 more). I sort of appreciated that as the books went on, there was more that I could actually see happening (I loved the Stacey plotline where she'd thought she'd outgrown the BSC, and they are IMO some of the best books in the series), but I guess I just moved on and read other things.

I was never into California Diaries, although some of my "too cool for the BSC" friends read them. I was never really into the whole teen angst thing.

[susyhomewrecker]

I stopped buying the books at #99. I think that was in the middle of the summer before I started middle school, so I figured I had grown out of them. My mom bought me a couple of the books the following Christmas, which I read of course, but in a more cynical way. Maybe it was because I was 11 and had just discovered irony, or maybe it was because the series jumped the shark, what with Claudia being sent back to 7th grade, and Mary Anne's house burning down, and Abby's twin being diagnosed with Scoliosis. That all really happened, right?

The series ended, I think, when I was in ninth grade. I didn't realize until my friend came back from Hawaii with the final book, which she had only been able to find in the airport there. Eventually, everyone but Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne and Stacey left the club. They had hired 'tween models to pose for the book covers sometime between 1997-2000 (I guess). I remember looking at the photograph on the cover of the last book and thinking, "those girls look so young! They look...uh...thirteen!" Which is funny, because on the illustrated covers of my childhood, the girls always looked like they were AT LEAST old enough to drive.

Oh, yeah, and in the last book they finally graduated from 8th grade! After repeating it 12 times!

Guilty confession....my friends and I started a Babysitter's Club group on Facebook. I'm Dawn (heck YES) and I am not the least bit embarrassed by this fact.

[spinsterliz]

I stopped reading them because I thought they were getting too repetative. They also got too gimmicky. I remember there was a book called "Claudia's Freind[crossed out] Friend" and then another one called "Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies" and I thought, "Boy, they're really stretching if they have to go for stupid titles like that to make things interesting."

I also got tired of the same old scenario that was always used in this series: babysitter deals with difficult child. Babysitter thinks difficult child is a big brat. Eventually, it turns out the child is only difficult because he/she has some kind of problem (strict parents, bullying friends, etc). Babysitter realizes this and intervenes. Problem is solved. Babysitter says something corny like, "I'd take care of [formerly difficult child] any day!" Everyone is happy. The end.

I can think of at least five examples of this right off the top of my head. The kid who was a t.v. star and had no "real" friends, the girl who was very smart and had too much pressure on her, the cute twins whom nobody could tell apart and felt they had no individuality, blah blah etc. All of them judged to be little monsters, all of them later figured out to be misunderstood. Not a straight-up bratty child among them. Puh-leeze.

[dancedancexenu]

I can't quite remember when I stopped reading, but I also inherited the books from my sister (who also had a library of them. She had an elaborate system involving hand-made envelopes glued inside with those date-stamp pages that I totally know she ganked from our elementary school library), so I might have stopped reading when she stopped reading them. I think I moved directly from BSC to Agatha Christie mysteries. Yes, I was a weird child.

Has anyone seen this?