LS #38, Karen's Big Lie

This is one of my very favorite Little Sister books. Maybe even my favorite. It starts out in school, and Ms. Colman tells the class they are going to start having timed math quizzes. I loved Mad Minute Math quizzes when I was young. I loved tests and quizzes of all kinds, actually. Unfortunately, I don't get to take the quizzes, Karen does, and Karen is a little annoyed, because math isn't her best subject, and she has to count on her fingers to answer the questions. She gets a 68 on the first quiz and resolves to look for her flash cards and drill a bit, but of course by the time she finally digs them out, she doesn't actually feel like studying. When Ms. Colman gives the second quiz, Karen only figures out the answers to three of the problems before she looks over at Ricky's paper and decides to copy his answers. There is an illustration of this in the book and their desks are pushed so close together it would be almost impossible for her not to look at his paper, I'm just saying. Also in the picture Karen is so not subtle while looking at his paper that I don't know how people three classrooms away didn't catch her.

Ricky is handsome as hell in this picture, too. I can see why Karen would want to pretend marry him. Also I know I only took a photo of half the page, but nothing is drawn up at the top there.

Hannie is getting good grades on the quizzes. She tells Karen and Nancy that she's been studying, and asks if Karen has. Karen admits that she has not, and explains that the quizzes are unfair because they are timed. If they could take all day to do them, she'd be able to count on her fingers and get every answer right.

Karen gets an 80 on the quiz she copied from Ricky. She told us she answered all the problems in the first column and about half in the second, and we know that she got two wrong answers on the three she filled in by herself. Ricky finished the whole quiz and got a 90. Hannie got a 94. So the difference between half a column filled in and having those answers filled in but some wrong is apparently ten points. I can't make the math work out right for this to be so. Maybe Karen filled in more than half of the column and is as inaccurate with fractions as she is with addition. Really if she filled in one and one half out of two columns she shouldn't be able to score higher than 75%.

Karen does some half-hearted studying with her flash cards, and vows not to copy from Ricky again, but the next quiz is a subtraction quiz, and she's not getting enough answers so she copies again. She is cheating off of her pretend husband. I suppose it's marginally better to cheat off of him than cheat on him. Ha ha. Hannie is pretty cold to Karen at recess after the subtraction quiz. On Monday, when the quizzes come back, Karen gets a 90. Hannie tells her on the playground that she saw Karen cheating. Karen calls Hannie a liar, but we all know who's lying.

(Karen. Karen is the one who's lying.)

Karen gets a 100 on the next quiz, but she doesn't do her own work, because Mommy had company over for dinner and Karen didn't have time to look at her flash cards. That bitch. It's like she wants Karen to cheat.
The next time they have a quiz, though, Ricky is absent. Karen panics and says she is going to barf and needs to go to the nurse. The nurse lets her lie down until school is almost over. The next day Ricky comes back to school, and Ms. Colman has the two of them stay in and make up the quiz. Karen isn't sure what to do with Ms. Colman staring at them, but luckily another teacher comes by and Ms. C gets distracted enough that Karen can copy Ricky's paper. She grades the quizzes right there, and the kids both got the same score, and Ms. C asks them if they're copying, and they both say no. Karen is so upset that she misses a day of school with vague symptoms. When she comes back, Ms. Colman gives them another quiz, and Karen resolves not to cheat. She counts on her fingers a whole bunch and doesn't even finish half the quiz. Then she confesses that she has been cheating. Lisa and Seth punish her by not letting her watch TV for two weeks, and Watson and Elizabeth punish her by taking away her allowance for two weeks. Then Karen and Hannie make up.

Meanwhile, there is a boring subplot where David Michael wants to get a "buzzsaw" haircut, or a piercing, or a tattoo, and gets told no. David Michael complains that his friends will think he's a baby if he can't have the haircut, tattoo, or piercing. You know, because all of their parents would certainly allow it. He tells Karen he got a tattoo anyway and shows her a dragon on his shoulder. Karen somehow does not at all question how a 7 year old would get a tattoo, and thinks it's real. In the end it turns out it was a temporary tattoo and it faded away. I guess even in Stoneybrook where they pierce young teenagers' ears with no parents around they won't tattoo a second grader.

The best part in this book, and there are a lot of good parts, is when Karen confesses to Ricky that she's been cheating and he's mad for like two seconds and then he's like "Okay. Then I forgive you. After all, you are my wife." I hate to be the one to tell you this, Rick, but there's an old saying. Once a cheater, always a cheater. I bet they're pretend divorced by the end of third grade, but Karen will probably still collect pretend alimony until at least 6th.

#47, Mallory on Strike

I was going to do Kristy's Great Idea next, and maybe do the series in order, but then that felt like work, so I figured I'd just read what I was in the mood for. And today I was in the mood for some Mallory angst. This book has always been one of my favorites. I particularly like the chapters where Mallory has to do asinine tasks for her family, like make Claire a peanut butter sandwich so she can have a picnic with her dolls. Because her mom doesn't feel like it, or is busy, or something, so she finds Mallory and gets her to do it, even though making the damn sandwich would probably take less long than hunting down Mallory and asking her to make it.

This book starts out with Mallory finding out about Young Author's Day, and she wants to go home and finish her homework super fast so she can start thinking up the perfect story idea, but then she has to take care of her younger brothers and sisters. Claire is upset because the triplets are scaring her, Margo is getting into their mom's makeup (and she has painted her lips with orange lipstick, and I want to know why Mallory's mom even owns orange lipstick), Nicky gets bitten by their hamster and then the hamster gets loose and they have to catch him, Mallory's mom wants her to calm the triplets down. I do not know why the hell the triplets listen to Mallory when she is only a year older than they are and there are three of them, but they do.

I sort of loathe Frodo the Pike family hamster. It's not his fault, but he's always getting loose and having to be caught and that just makes me think there's rodent feces ground into all their carpets and it just seems sort of asinine that with eight kids the pet they get (at this point) is one nocturnal caged animal to pester and annoy. If I were their mother I would spend most of my time yelling. Of course if I were their mother I wouldn't have gotten pregnant within months of delivering triplets. Can you imagine? Five kids under three when Vanessa was born. No wonder that in the early books the Pikes are characterized as letting their kids do whatever they want. They had no strength left to fight after they had their eighth kid in six years.

Meeting time! Mallory informs us that Kristy does not need to wear a bra yet. I care deeply.

Claudia can wear anything and it looks great. Like she'll wear polka dot leggings with a short red skirt. Then she'll wear a long-sleeved T-shirt with a black vest (covered with cool pins that she's made herself) over that. Sometimes she decides to go fifties and wear penny loafers with white anklets.

I never understood the big deal about penny loafers in these books.

Mallory sets her alarm for 7:00 on Saturday morning. She tells us it is agony to get up so early and usually she would sleep until at least eight. I work at 6:00 am, so I guess I should consider 8 to be sleeping in, but I don't. On my last day off I slept until 3 pm. So maybe it's just my night-owl tendencies, but I don't consider anything before 11 to be sleeping in.

There's more shit with Mallory having to care for her siblings. Byron spills a glass of milk at the table and their mom asks Mallory to clean it up. WTF. He's ten years old, I think he can use a damn sponge. Hell, I'd expect the five year old to at least make an effort to clean up her own mess. Maybe I'm just unreasonable.

Mallory keeps having to spend a bunch of time looking after her siblings, and she doesn't want to take new baby-sitting jobs. She babysits for the Barrett kids, and Buddy cuts his foot while riding his bike, so she decides she should either be an associate member or just quit the club. Instead, Kristy tells her to take two weeks off.

Mallory goes on strike one Saturday so she can finish writing. She sits in her room all day, not even emerging to eat. The Pike Parents, horror stricken at the idea of actually having to care for their own kids, call Dawn and Mary Anne over to babysit, make up a quick bullshit story about an emergency library board meeting, and head out to paint the town red. Dawn and Mary Anne have to feed the kids pizza. The book says they have to cut the crust off Margo's pizza and cut Claire's slice into bite-sized pieces. My niece is three and she's been able to eat pizza by herself for at least a year, no cutting required. I'm just saying. Also who cuts the crust off pizza? You use the crust like a handle, then leave it on your plate at the end if you don't want it. Or if you are eating pizza at my mom's house you can throw it into the living room and say, "Oh no, pizza crust flew into the living room!" and watch her dog go running to gobble it up. My mom will give you a dirty look, but it's tradition. The dog's getting old now though, so you may have to act fast if you want to get an invitation to pizza night before there's nobody to eat the crust and it just sits there and congeals.

How could you not want to throw pizza crusts to her?

Anyway, Mallory talks to her parents and they decide that from now on they'll try to demand less from her, and then the next day she and Jessi go to the mall, and then her story wins the prize, and then the next weekend she takes her siblings on a totally lame outing, including paper hats, which they all enjoy and decree to be the most fun ever. Even the ten-year old boys. At one point in the day they stop by the Braddock house, where a backyard circus is being held by some neighbor kids. 

#66, Maid Mary Anne

One of my favorite recurring mentions in the series is that Dawn's mother, Sharon, is "scatter-brained" and leaves shit in weird places. Unfortunately the examples given tend to be less scatter-brained and more "on heavy drugs." In this book, Mary Anne is trying to give us examples.

Sharon's personality couldn't be more different than my father's. She might not notice if her sweater or coat were buttoned up the wrong way -- or maybe even if it were inside out or backwards. If she were going to organize the bathroom cabinet, she'd probably arrange things according to color, or shape. And it's a definite possibility that sooner or later you'd look in the cabinet and find something that didn't belong at all, like a letter stamped and ready to be mailed. Sharon is absent-minded that way.

A few pages later: "Plate! Now I remember!" she cried. "The laundry soap! I put it in the kitchen cabinet with the dishes!"

Tell me that is just normal scatter-brained behavior. Oh also Mary Anne says earlier that her father has organized their bathroom cabinet by alphabetizing it. I dunno, I think that's just as weird as arranging it by shape or color. I lump like things together, so if I need to patch up a cut, the bandaids and Neosporin are next to each other, not next to the cotton balls and nose drops, respectively. (Richard has nose drops. You know he does.)

One of the things the good people of Stoneybrook are obsessed with is a baby goat by the name of Elvira. She belongs to a couple named Stone, who live on a farm that is in the middle of a residential area. I am not sure how that zoning works, but I imagine the farm was grandfathered in. I also imagine I would not want to live next door to a farm. Anyway I get that baby animals are cute and all, but I don't know why everyone goes crazy over Elvira the goat.

Mary Anne babysits the Arnold twins. They are identical twins, but Carolyn has a mullet and Marilyn plays the piano, so you can tell them apart. She takes them to the Stone farm, because why not. Mrs. Stone tells Mary Anne that she should meet an old lady named Mrs. Towne, who is good at sewing. Mary Anne tells this to the rest of the club at the meeting, and Kristy is all "Well did you call?" and Mary Anne's all "No, I'm pathologically shy, remembers?" and Kristy is all, "Well this was a waste of three chapters if you don't," so Mary Anne calls and Mrs. Towne invites her over.

No Claudia outfit, just a brief mention that she has a unique sense of style and she painted her sneakers with her own personal designs.

Mary Anne and Mrs. Towne hit it off and Mary Anne is going to take sewing lessons from her. Also she randomly brings the Pike kids to visit the damn goat and on the way home they stop by to harass visit Mrs. Towne and the kids are enchanted with all her sewing projects and Mary Anne gets a fabulous idea to teach a kids' sewing class. The kids are super excited about this. Mary Anne teaches them to make a quilt, and there's another bit where the two boys in the class get teased for doing girl stuff, so they quit the class and try to act really macho in the way only 8-year old boys can, and then it turns out all right and the boys re-join up just in time to add their squares to the friendship quilt the class is making.

When Mary Anne shows up for her first sewing lesson, she finds that Mrs. Towne has fallen and broken her ankle, so she calls an ambulance. Then she visits Mrs. Towne in the hospital and brings her one of her quilts to cheer her up. I would be somewhat less than cheery if my handcrafted quilt was brought to me in a hospital, but that's probably because smells are a huge trigger for my migraines and I'd be afraid I'd never get the hospital smell out. Mrs. Towne is happy, anyway, or at least fakes it.

Then Mary Anne does a few chores for Mrs. Towne, and Mrs. Towne suggests that Mary Anne can pay for her sewing lessons by doing chores, and Mary Anne says okay, and then she ends up spending an inordinate amount of time at this old lady's house. She's all right with it until it ruins a date with Logan. They were supposed to ride their bikes to the lake and go swimming and have a picnic and go hiking but Mrs. Towne calls and is like "ZOMG a wasp got in my kitchen!" so they go chase it out and Logan keeps almost kissing Mary Anne and then they eat their picnic on Mrs. Towne's porch instead because eating with an old person is exactly as fun as swimming in a lake with no adults around. So then a few days later Mary Anne tells Mrs. Towne that she doesn't want to do chores all the fucking time anymore and Mrs. Towne says that's okay and she's going to hire a housekeeper and Mary Anne can pay for her sewing lessons with money instead of mopping the kitchen floor, and Mary Anne says okay even though she knows Mrs. Towne is a One Book Character so it doesn't matter what kind of agreement they have, there will never be another lesson.

Harriet the Spy mentioned in passing as a book that Mallory and Jessi both enjoyed.

Kristy's Book

The portrait collections are an interesting part of the BSC universe. They're supposedly an autobiography written by the narrator. SMS loves assigning giant ass english projects apparently. Although come to think of it, I remember writing an autobiography in third grade. The teacher typed them up for us. This was back in the 80s when typing something up on the computer and printing it out was a Big Deal. I remember getting mad at her for fucking with the punctuation. Example: I wrote about my baby blanket. When she typed it, she put that the blanket was "pink with a design on one side!" Bitch, that doesn't need an exclamation point, and there wasn't one in the source material. Type it how I wrote it. I was an angry third grader apparently. Anyway, the portrait books. Each portrait collection has four or so stories about the girls as they grew up. There are six of them: Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, Stacey, Abby, and Dawn. The sixth graders do not get them.

I basically hated Kristy's Book. The part after her dad left especially. Elizabeth left a 10, 8, and 6 year old home alone after school, and had lists of chores for them where the ten-year old was in charge of bathing the baby every night. I mean call me paranoid but I think she was lucky the kids didn't burn the house down or get seriously injured.

Then in the next story, Kristy goes to softball camp, and it is repeatedly stressed that she is an awesome shortstop and she is left handed. And those things just don't go together. You can play shortstop OR be left-handed. And it annoys me.

Imagine how awkward this throw to first would be if you were throwing lefty.

Then the last story is lifted from the plot of the BSC movie, and it's not that compelling of a read. Kristy's dad comes to town! And he only wants to see her! But eventually it turns out he is a giant flake! And he leaves again! After giving her a glove that he got free from an awards banquet, but he tries to pass it off as a gift, but it's not even a left-handed glove. But Kristy's stepdad gets her a lefty glove. Because Kristy is left-handed! And a shortstop!

Yeah.

LS #61, Karen's Tattletale

There are only two Little Sister books that are not titled in the format of Karen's [Thing]. One of them is LS #14, Karen's in Love, which uses Karen's as a contraction and not a possessive, and the other is LS-SS #4, Karen, Hannie, and Nancy: The Three Musketeers. The latter, incidentally, is listed in the back of a lot of the books as Karen's Three Musketeers. So in tonight's book, Karen acquires a tattletale, namely her brother Andrew. This is more fun to read about than when she gets a pony or a tuba or an island vacation.

Anyway, Karen's Tattletale is set in the springtime, and Ms. Colman tells the class that the school will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in a month. I guess that first year they had a very short school year. Who knows how long it took through trial and error before they decided school should start in the fall. Karen's class needs to decide on something that they will do in the Jamboree. The kids are all supposed to think of things, but after the class gives their ideas, Ms. Colman and the music teacher strongarm them into singing a medley of songs from The Wizard of Oz. The good citizens of Stoneybrook are obsessed with that movie for unknown reasons. Karen tries out for a solo because she loves the sound of her own voice and figures everyone else will, too. She gets the part.

Meanwhile, Andrew is pissed at Karen for not being very sympathetic that his preschool teacher punished him by not letting him paint at the easels for half an hour. He doesn't speak to her for a while, and then he starts tattling on her for everything she does. Karen's mother, Lisa, tells Karen to try and be more sympathetic to Andrew because it is frustrating to be the youngest in the family. Seth, Karen's stepfather, has built a new screen door, but it sticks open a little, and he tells the kids to slam it so the pets won't get out and he'll get a new part for it in a few weeks. Before he can get the new part, the door gets left open, and his dog, Midgie, gets out and is almost hit by a car. Andrew tattles that Karen left the door open and Lisa punishes her by not letting her sing her solo at the Jamboree. This strikes me as a weird punishment but whatever. Karen's solo is given instead to her "best enemy" Pamela Harding. Pamela gloats about it. We're supposed to not like Pamela because she's mean to Karen and tries to act too grown-up, but I like her anyway. In this book Pamela beats Karen in the three-legged race on Field Day and gets tangled up with Karen in the sack race and they both lose. Karen doesn't win anything. This makes me happy. Much happier than the ending of the actual book Karen's Field Day.

Then because the book is almost over, Andrew admits that he lied and Karen wasn't the one who forgot to shut the door and nearly got poor Midgie killed. It was Andrew. He has to go to his room for an hour and not watch TV for a week. That is not such a bad thing in Stoneybrook, where the only shows on TV are ancient reruns apparently. Karen gets to sing her solo after all, but she feels bad for Pamela, who had been excited to sing the solo, so she and Pamela share the solo by singing alternating lines.

Unfortunately by the next book Andrew goes back to being a doormat, but it's pretty fun to read this one and see him fighting back against Karen.

Introduction

I own the entire series of Baby-Sitters Club books, except for about half of the Friends Forever ones, and frankly I will probably not bother to acquire those because they bore me. I also don't have most of the Kids in Ms. Colman's Class books and they're a bit harder to find and again, not too interesting to me, so I probably won't hunt those down either. The books I do have remind me of my childhood. I reread them when I get stressed and after a while I started to notice certain things cropping up over and over again, so, as I read them, I figured I'd try and compile a list of  recurring mentions of things like I Love Lucy, The Wizard of Oz, Karen Brewer's game of Let's All Come In, and weird outfits Claudia wears. I'll also give a summary of plots and subplots. Non regular series books will be noted with abbreviations.

• LS # for Little Sister books
• LS-SS # for Little Sister super specials
• M # for mysteries
• SM # for super mysteries
• SS # for super specials
• DB, KB, MAB, SB, AB, CB for the portraits
• LS, LB, SS for Logan's Story, Logan Bruno, Boy Baby-Sitter, and Shannon's Story
• CG for the complete guide

I won't promise to update frequently but I'll get back to it when I can. Hopefully eventually I'll have mini-recaps for every book.

Old post from elsewhere #3

Originally posted in November of 2007--


Warning:  Long and boring post under the cut.


I probably let my own feelings on this subject color my perceptions, but for a long time I've held that Karen's two families don't really teach her very well about all that goes into adopting a pet, leading to several pets that have to be rehomed for reasons that probably could have been foreseen.  So tonight I pulled all of the LS books I could think of (that I own) that I could remember having new animals introduced into them.  Then I made a list of how and why they got the pet, why it had to be rehomed (if it did; they kept a few), and who was the lucky new owner.  So, the official verdict?  I actually was surprised that there were really not that many that annoyed me, but the ones that did, really annoyed me.

Old post from elsewhere #2

Originally posted Feb 2007--


And now we get the more thoughts on the Baby-Sitters Club books that I threatened a few days ago.

What planet does the author live on where 13- year olds get jobs?  Not just baby-sitting, but actual paying jobs?  Like when Logan is a busboy at the Rosebud Cafe.  No.  This does not happen.  Period.  

I always thought Stacey ranked somewhere in the middle of my favorite sitters, but in my readthrough of the series, two of the three books so far that I have been unable to finish were Stacey books.  (#35, Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook, and #58, Stacey's Choice.)  On the other hand, one of my favorites, #83, Stacey vs. the BSC, was a Stacey book.  But the other two were so awful and I realized that I hate a lot of Stacey's constant divorced parents plots, so I had to drop her down to second-least favorite.  Least favorite is still Dawn.

Why did the Pikes have 8 kids in six years when they can't bear to spend time with any of them?  Seriously, Mrs. Pike hires two baby-sitters to watch her kids when she needs to go to the grocery store between 3:30 and 5:00...despite not having a job...she could not possibly do this while the kids are in school or take Claire with her when she picks her up from kindergarten?  I will not even get into the logistics of having eight kids in six years...who gets pregnant within months of having triplets?  Seriously?

And yet I still read them, and enjoy them, because it's fun to escape into a world where responsible girls who love to babysit manage to be friends despite their differences.

Old post from elsewhere

Originally posted in Feb 2007--


Currently I am rereading the Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin in order. Yeah. I don't own the entire series, but I'm getting closer. I used to have this little wallet size printout of which ones I still needed to carry with me to the thrift stores. This was to keep me from ending up with 3 copies of #47, Mallory On Strike. It didn't really work. So, random BSC thoughts:

I hate Dawn and everything that comes out of her mouth. She's a self-righteous, self-centered brat. Also her portrait collection really annoyed me because she kept eating chicken through the whole damn thing and I was just waiting for the chapter where she explained that she decided to become a vegetarian but it never came, even though she was a militant non-meat eater in other books. I did enjoy #88, Farewell, Dawn, or as I prefer to call it "Good Riddance, Dawn." The only other one I liked was #57, Dawn Saves the Planet, because she was so over-the-top obnoxious that everyone else hated her too. Also it featured this totally classic bit:

"We just sold ten bird houses," Buddy cried with glee.
"What's wrong with that?" I asked.
"Nothing," Bill replied, looked slightly confused. "We thought it was great news."
"Yeah," Buddy added. "Do you know how much money we've made?"
Stacey, the math whiz, came up beside me and answered, "Twenty dollars. Great work, guys!"

Yup. That's right. Stacey the math whiz just totally multiplied two times ten. IN HER HEAD. And she's only in the eighth grade. That part cracks me up every time I come across it.

Speaking of smart, Janine Kishi was so not holed up in her room just doing homework. Seriously, she probably had all kinds of nerdy cool projects going on. Even when I read the early books in like fourth grade and realized that Janine had the family computer in her room, I knew she was totally playing games. She's a freaking genius, she doesn't need five hours to do her physics homework. I always hated how they wrote Janine, because she was so bright and they seemed to make fun of her. She was a caricature long before the rest of the characters in the series began to be caricatures of themselves. Why is it okay to make fun of Janine for being smart, but not to make fun of Claudia for being dumb?

Claudia's outfits were the highlights of the books in the 40-70 range. And they all ended with something like, "anyone else would have looked like a clown, but Claud looked like a model!" It's as though the ghostwriters were trying to outdo the outrageousness of each previous getup. Here's an example from #59, Mallory Hates Boys (and Gym):

Today was a good example. Claudia was wearing a pair of soft, balloony, purple pants; a neon green long-sleeve leotard top; a wide, red braided belt; and a pair of soft, red ballet shoes. Her hair was swept into a French braid with wispy tendrils hanging loose. From one ear dangled a long earring made up of small papier-mache tropical fruit. In the other ear, where she had two holes, Claudia wore two small papier-mache hoops. (This earring set is her own creation.) If I wore an outfit like that, I'd look like a lunatic. But not Claudia. She looked like a fashion model.

Bullshit. All she needs is a squeaky damn red nose and a flower that squirts water when someone tries to sniff it.

Gah. It's way late. More thoughts on this another time.