It’s a clear sign of your cultural impact when you inspire a major plot of an episode of The Simpsons. Lisa and Janey may be reading a different series, but the covers are unmistakable to any girl who grew up in a certain time. True, their books also have DNA from other books we’ll be covering this month, but at their heart, they are inspired by more residents of a fictional town, albeit one that is in a defined state. It seems probable that real girls were inspired just as Lisa was to start babysitting, though I personally was inspired more by the fact that my sister was aging out and moved away, leaving me with her clients.
In the case of these books, twelve-year-old Kristy Thomas is watching her mother frantically call babysitters for Kristy’s brother, David Michael. She realizes that it would be great for her mother if she could make one phone call and reach a whole group of babysitters, one of whom might be available. She pairs with Claudia Kishi, a friend who has her own phone, who becomes the club’s vice president. The other members are Mary Anne Spier, Kristy’s best friend, and Stacey McGill, Claudia’s best friend. When Stacey moves back to New York, her job as treasurer is taken over by California transplant Dawn Schafer. Later, younger girls Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey would join as junior members.
Although the girls live in a pleasant fictional Connecticut town, their lives are hardly idyllic. Kristy’s father bailed on the family when she was very young. Claudia’s grandmother dies, and her sister is kind of insufferable. Mary Anne’s mother died of cancer when Mary Anne was a baby, and her father responds by being overprotective. Stacey’s got Type 1 diabetes, and her parents divorce. Dawn’s parents are divorced; her mother returns to her childhood home, while her father stays in California. Eventually, Dawn’s brother will move back to their father’s house. Mallory is the oldest of eight and frets about being too young. Jessi is dealing with the racism of being one of the only black kids in Stoneybrook.
It’s also true that most of what they’re dealing with is excruciatingly familiar to anyone who babysat as a kid. The kids who don’t like you. The kids who are nothing but trouble. Trying to keep things going and earn a little extra money while still having a life. The girls—and associate member Logan Bruno, who’s only somewhat part of the story most of the time—are having ordinary junior high school lives, dealing with not just babysitting but the issues of being in school and the issues of having their family around them. Braces and boys and bullies all form part of the story of the girls’ lives.
Ann M. Martin doesn’t know how many of the books she wrote, though they’re all listed as being by her. She estimates she wrote sixty to eighty of the 213 books published between 1986 and 2000. Peter Lerangis wrote many of the others; he’s prolific enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s at least one other ghostwriter in there somewhere. I don’t know who wrote which, but I could probably knock one out with not too much effort. All the books are first-person as told by one of the girls, and the basic form is the same for all of them.
There have been two series and a movie based on them. The first series and the movie were made in the ‘90s, at the height of the books’ popularity, and the new series is for Netflix and relies, I suspect, on Millennial nostalgia. Alicia Silverstone plays Kristy’s mother, for heaven’s sake. There is also a series of graphic novel adaptations of the books, and they’ve started on covering the Younger Sister spin-off series. There’s no enormous groundswell of demand for them, but there’s a constant nostalgia for the series from people of the right age.
Where do you start the series? I’m going to be saying this a lot this month, but it doesn’t matter. You can start with Kristy’s Big Idea, book one, but I didn’t read that until recently. I think the first one I read was #3, The Truth About Stacey, with Stacy talking about her diabetes. I’ve read scattered books across the series and definitely not all two hundred-plus. And some of them I only read in graphic novel. It doesn’t matter, because every book will give you the basics of who everyone is and what’s going on.
The writing level on these is of an age with its protagonists. These are junior high-level fluff, and that’s okay; junior high-level fluff is still getting junior high kids to read, and that matters. Even if you’re like Claudia, eating cached junk food and reading books your parents disapprove of, it’s still reading. (Did they ever test Claudia for dyslexia?) Or Mallory and Jessi, who both desperately love books. The series is at least aware that both kinds of girls exist and are valid.
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