#35, Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook

Don't be surprised if this turns out pretty short because this is my least favorite BSC book. It derails me every time I try to do a straight read-through of the series.

Here is the cover. Stacey and Charlotte are looking at an old house that is going to be torn down. Charlotte looks terrified. Stacey looks fat, although it could just be her super unflattering sweater. Also I cut off the edge when I scanned. Maybe I should find a source for images and give up on attempting to appropriately use my scanner.

This book opens up with Stacey on the train ride back from visiting her dad in NYC for the weekend, with a description of everything they did. I know these books like to point out that Kristy's stepdad is a real live millionaire but Stacey's dad isn't hurting for money at all, either. Every time she goes to see him for a weekend there are plays, restaurants, and shopping trips.

Back in Stoneybrook, Charlotte Johanssen's parents have a very special job for the BSC. See, Mr. J's father has to have surgery, so the Johanssens are going to go stay with him for a week, but they don't want Charlotte to miss an entire week of school, because fourth grade is just that important. So they want Charlotte to stay with either Jessi's family or Stacey. Jessi's family is going out of town for the weekend, so Stacey gets permission from her mother to have Charlotte stay at their house for a week. She's really excited and gets the guest room all ready with some of her old toys and books and a special set of Raggedy Ann sheets that her mom got at a yard sale. Based on knowledge of vintage character sheet sizes and an admittedly half-assed eBay search, this leads me to the conclusion that Stacey and her mother have a twin sized bed in their guest bedroom. I wonder if they have separate larger sleeping accommodations elsewhere, or if couples visiting them must simply get a motel room. These are the kinds of things I wonder about when reading these books. Someday I will draw up floor plans for each of the BSC homes and try to resolve these issues.

They are festive sheets though.

Charlotte is nervous and homesick and doesn't even feel like eating supper, even though spaghetti and meatballs is usually a favorite meal for her. After supper Stacey teaches her to play the card game War. She claims that they play 12 games of War in a row before she puts Charlotte to bed. Either they are playing a vastly different version of the game than I did or Stacey is exaggerating for comic effect or Charlotte's bedtime is 3 am because 12 games of War would take hours the way I learned it.

The next day, a Friday, Stacey takes Charlotte to see an old house that is being torn down and they hear weird noises and see a swarm of flies and a face in the window. It's really boring scary. They tell the rest of the club all about it at the BSC meeting, which Charlotte is allowed to attend because heaven forfend Stacey should just miss a meeting while baby-sitting.

Kristy babysits for her younger siblings and stepsiblings in the next boring chapter. Karen tells scary stories. Kristy reads them a chapter out of Ozma of Oz and the book tells us they are reading through all the Oz books because they just saw the movie. When I started this project I thought my Wizard of Oz tag would get less use than my I Love Lucy tag but thus far I have been dead wrong. She sings them lullabies including the Ghostbusters theme song. The book states the title as "WhoYa Gonna Call" but the actual song title is Ghostbusters. This inaccuracy annoys me more than it probably should. Then Kristy reads some books about the history of Stoneybrook that Watson recently got at an estate sale and finds a map that seems to show that the house that's being torn down is built on the most boring spot on earth on an ancient burial ground.

On Saturday, Charlotte wakes up with a fever, and Stacey takes her to the doctor. She says that the waiting room choices are this month's Highlights for Children or a July 1979 Reader's Digest. She picks up Highlights and then is totally embarrassed because a cute guy walks into the waiting room with his brother and sees her holding it. The 1979 Reader's Digest is one of those things that gets a little funnier as time passes. When the book was published in June 1990, oh, ha ha, the waiting room has a magazine that is a decade old. Now the waiting room gives you a choice between a current magazine or a 30 year old one. It'll be even more funny in ten years, right? Right? It turns out that Charlotte has tonsillitis and has to take liquid penicillin. She whines about it so Stacey shows her all of the things she has to do to manage her diabetes like poke her finger and use test strips and give herself shots, and then Charlotte stops whining about the medicine. Something about this technique seems a little off to me but whatever. The book is half over.

The next day Charlotte is feeling a bit better so Stacey invites Kristy to come over with her boring ass history books and look for clues about the old house. Then in the next chapter Claudia is babysitting the Perkins girls and takes them to the library for story hour, and she does some research and finds that the house is owned by an old dude who now lives in a nursing home.

On Monday after school Stacey and Charlotte walk to the old house and they think they see a fire but when they rush to put it out (safety first!) there is no fire. They both have nightmares about the old house. Then there's an emergency meeting of the BSC and Claudia and Mallory also have boring scary stories to tell about the house.

Mallory and Dawn babysit for the Pikes and the Pike kids are kinda gross and eat gross food. Byron, the fatty triplet, eats a bologna and grape jelly sandwich and Nicky, the weird kid, eats a peanut butter and bologna sandwich. Adam and Jordan eat cold spaghetti-os. They want to eat them straight out of the can but Dawn makes them put them on plates. Some environmentalist she is. Now they'll just have to use precious water to wash those dishes. Margo eats bread and butter, Claire has cereal, Vanessa has a fried egg, and Mallory has a ham sandwich. The Pikes gross me out sometimes. The Pike kids want to put on a play and they choose the Wizard of Oz. Hang on, afk making a surprised face.

The next day they go to the nursing home and the elderly owner of the house tells them boring scary stories about it and says they'll know whether it's haunted when it's finally torn down the next day. And when they go the next day to watch like the whole town is there watching the house get torn down. Because watching a house be demolished, that's a thing, right? Stacey thinks she sees the house go up in flames but Charlotte is like "can we go? this is boring." which is the most sensible thing anyone has said this entire book and Stacey runs back to the nursing home and finds out the old dude died in the night and finds out he left a note for her telling her that his stories were not true and then Kristy says that Charlie and Sam talked to the workmen and there are explanations for everything they saw and heard and unsurprisingly they are all boring as hell. Stacey and Charlotte go home and play some more War and then Charlotte's parents come to pick her up and everything is back to normal in Stoneybrook.