Chapter II

 

Synopsis of the Series

 

 

The Baby-sitters Club series is about a group of girls in Stoneybrook (Connecticut) Middle School who run a baby-sitting business.  They start at 12 years old in 7th grade and turn 13 over the first few books.  By the time they are in 8th grade, they stay 13 throughout the remainder of the series and no longer age or move up a grade (although the seasons, school year beginnings and endings, etc., are approximately the same as the particular time each new book comes out).  The four original members are Kristy Thomas, president; Claudia Kishi, vice president; Mary Anne Spier, secretary; and Stacey McGill, treasurer.  Dawn Schafer joins in book 5 as an alternate officer and takes over as treasurer when Stacey moves away in book 13.  The Club replaces Stacey with two 11-year-old 6th graders, Mallory Pike and Jessi Ramsey, as junior officers in book 14.  Stacey moves back to Stoneybrook in book 28 and resumes her office of treasurer.  Mary Anne’s boyfriend Logan Bruno joins as an associate member (he does not attend meetings but can be called on to take a sitting job in a pinch) in book 10, and Shannon Kilbourne, a neighbor of Kristy’s in her new neighborhood, becomes an associate member in book 11.  Shannon becomes a regular member when Dawn moves back to California temporarily in book 67, but Dawn returns to Stoneybrook in book 81.  Stacey leaves the club in book 83 but comes back in book 87.  Dawn moves out West permanently in book 88 and is eventually replaced by Abby Stevenson in book 89.  As of book 126, Mallory leaves Stoneybrook and goes off to boarding school.  After the end of the regular series at book 131, a new series, BSC Friends Forever, began, and everyone resigns from the BSC except the original four members, Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Stacey.  All the way through the series, the club meets in Claudia’s bedroom three afternoons a week to receive calls from clients, but in the new series, the meetings are somewhat scaled back, as was the emphasis on baby-sitting, in favor of more teenage subject matter.

 

Kristy (Kristin) is small and young for her age and athletic.  Kristy thought up the idea for the Baby-sitters Club so that parents could reach a lot of available sitters with just one call.  She has three brothers and acquires a step­sister and stepbrother when her mother remarries in book 6 (and later on acquires an adopted half sister).  She is noted as a leader and for being outspoken (some say “a big mouth”) and having lots of good ideas.  Sometimes others complain she is too bossy, but she is almost always level-headed and makes the right deci­sions (except in book 74!).  Kristy is very tomboyish and coaches a little kids’ softball team called Kristy’s Krushers.  She is good friends with Bart, the coach of the rival Bashers, but she stops short of calling him her boyfriend.  When the BSC Friends Forever series begins, leaving only the original four members in the BSC, Kristy reluctantly agrees to scale back the structure of the club.

 

Claudia is Japanese-American and always wears unusual and exotic outfits of her own creation.  Although she is a poor speller and not a good student, she is a very talented artist and makes her own jewelry.  She was dev­as­tated by her grandmother Mimi’s death in book 26.  Her older sister Janine is a genius who takes college courses outside high school and has nothing in common with Claudia, who prefers to read her treasured Nancy Drew books.  Claudia is also a junk food addict and has things like Ring-Dings and Oreos hidden all over her room.  She fi­nally begins having such difficulty in school that she is moved back to seventh grade in book 101 but is reinstated in the eighth grade in book 113.

 

Mary Anne looks like Kristy but is different in that she is quiet and sensitive and cries easily.  Her widowed father brought her up very strictly and made her dress in babyish clothes, but he began to lighten up when Mary Anne showed him that she was responsible and needed to grow up a little.  She becomes the first one in the club to have a steady boyfriend, Logan Bruno, whom she meets in book 10, breaks up with in book 41, and gets back together with in book 46.  She exercises her independence by getting a new trendy short haircut in book 60.  Her house burns down in book 131, but her family decides to rebuild on the property and not leave Stoney­brook.  Mary Anne once again breaks up with Logan "for good" in BSC Friends Forever book 3.

 

Stacey (Anastasia) moved to Stoneybrook from New York City and, like her best friend Claudia, is very pretty and sophisticated and dresses the part.  In early polls taken of BSC readers, Stacey was the most popu­lar char­ac­ter in the books.  She is an only child and has diabetes, which means watching her diet carefully and giving her­self insulin injections.  After she moves back to New York, she baby-sits on her own and still ap­pears in the books once in a while.  Her best friend in New York is Laine Cummings (up until book 51 when they have a row and part company perma­nently).  Stacey returns to Stoneybrook for good with her mother after her parents’ di­vorce but visits her father in the city often.  Eventually, Stacey becomes too socially ad­vanced compared to the other baby-sitters and begins hanging around with her boyfriend Robert Brewster’s crowd instead, the end result being that she is kicked out of the BSC under extremely hard feelings among all the members.  However, after learn­ing her new friends’ true colors when they do bad stuff and get her into a great deal of trouble, Stacey has a change of heart and asks to be let back into the club.  After a while, in book 99, she breaks up with Robert too, after which time she goes out with Ethan in New York for several books.  Early in the new series, she ac­quires a new boyfriend in SMS, Jeremy, which causes a huge friendship rift between her and Claudia.

 

Dawn, having just moved from California, joins the club in book 5.  She has waist-length pale blond hair and retains her California heritage by hating cold weather and loving health food and environmental causes.  Her parents are divorced, and she lives with her mother and younger brother Jeff.  In book 15 Jeff moves back to California to live with their father.  In book 30 Dawn’s mother marries Mary Anne’s father, and she and Mary Anne become stepsisters.  After a while Dawn misses her California family and moves back with them for a few months before returning to Stoneybrook to reclaim her office of alternate officer in the BSC.  Upon Stacey’s temporary departure, she takes over the role of treasurer, but soon Dawn herself decides to move back to Cali­fornia for good, which she does in book 88.  She becomes a permanent member of the We © Kids Club there and remains in touch with the BSC.  She and Jeff both visit in Stoneybrook once in a while in later books.  Dawn and her California friends are the focus of the California Diaries series, which eliminates the baby-sitting aspect entirely and deals with grim and controversial topics, such as teenage runaways, drinking, anorexia, and a friend's parent's death from lung cancer resulting from smoking.

 

Mallory is two years younger and joins the BSC in book 14 with Jessi.  Because she has seven younger sib­lings, includ­ing identical boy triplets, she is already an experienced sitter at age 11.  Many of the baby-sitting adventures in the books involve the large Pike clan.  Mallory has curly red hair and wears glasses, loves read­ing horse stories, and wants to write and illustrate children’s books when she grows up.  Due to difficulty with peers at school, she decides to attend a boarding school in a neighboring state and leave the BSC in book 126.

 

Jessi (Jessica) and her family move into Stacey’s house after the McGills leave.  Jessi is a talented ballet dancer and takes lessons in nearby Stamford and performs on stage.  Like her best friend Mallory, she loves reading horse stories.  The Ramseys, being one of the few African-American families in Stoneybrook, encounter a lot of prejudice when they first arrive, but things get better right away.  Jessi has a younger sister and brother.  In the initial BSC Friends Forever book, she wins an important dance scholarship and resigns from the BSC.

 

Abby (Abigail) joins in book 89 to replace Dawn when she moves back to California.  Abby lives near Kristy and is full of humor and jokes and is good at sports.  She turns 13 in book 96 (to remain there forever like the others).  She has a twin sister Anna who is a talented musician and is not in the BSC.  Abby’s and Anna’s names were submitted by Sara Ruth Bell of Lexington, Missouri, who won the contest to name the new BSC member.  Like Jessi, Abby leaves the BSC in the initial Friends Forever book.

 

Logan is in Mary Anne’s grade, having moved recently from Louisville, Kentucky.  He is good friends with all of the BSC girls and possesses a Southern accent that the girls find charming.  He is on several athletic teams at school and is also a fine and experi­enced baby-sitter.  Shannon lives in Kristy’s new neighborhood and goes to private school.  She was very snobby to Kristy at first, but they eventually became good friends.  Both Logan and Shannon cease being associate members in the initial BSC Friends Forever book and leave the club.

 

There are many baby-sitting charges who appear over and over again throughout the books, such as all the Pike kids (triplets Adam, Byron, and Jordan, plus Vanessa, Nicky, Margo, and Claire); Kristy’s brother David Mi­chael, stepsister Karen, and stepbrother Andrew; Charlotte Johanssen; Jackie Rodowsky; Jenny Prezzioso (pro­nounced pret-see-OH-so); Myriah and Gabbie Perkins; Haley and Matt Braddock; the twins Marilyn and Caro­lyn Arnold; Buddy, Suzi, and Marnie Barrett; Jamie Newton, and many others.  Like the Baby-sitters them­selves, the little kids’ ages become frozen in time after the first dozen books or so.  Also like the BSC members, they have distinct personalities throughout the series, e.g., Jackie (“the Walking Disaster”) is accident-prone, Matt is deaf and his friends and the BSC use American Sign Language around him, Vanessa talks annoyingly in rhyme, Claire calls everyone “silly-billy-goo-goo” (Ann heard a 5-year-old kid on a New York City sidewalk use that expression), and prissy Jenny always dresses in party dresses and Mary Janes.

 

The essence of the Baby-sitters Club is that several distinctive and diverse personalities have one common bond, and these friends are incredibly loyal and close.  Even though there will be no more new books published, the books will continue to be printed, as the series is immensely popular and will continue to be followed faithfully by legions of pre-teen girls, many of whom no doubt use the series as a “How-To” guide for their own baby-sitting.  There are enough different kinds of personalities and characteristics among the baby-sitters that any girl could find at least one with whom she identifies and would like to emulate.  Great care was given to make sure the “facts” about the characters and about Stoneybrook were correct from book to book (see The Complete Guide to the Baby-sitters Club, published in September 1996).  Ann always had a lot of help from other authors writ­ing the books from her outlines, and then she and the editor would go over them to make sure that they sound like the work of one author, and Ann graciously ac­knowledged these authors at the beginning of each book.  The cover art of the BSC books was done by Hodges Soileau (pronounced swallow) since the begin­ning; however, the Friends Forever series pictured photos of live models on the covers.

 

There were a number of spin-off pieces of memorabilia connected with the series, and there was also a Fan Club with 60,000 members with a quarterly newsletter (lib­erally and perhaps excessively--even for kids--satu­rated with such ex­pressions as “cool,” “groovy,” “fave,” etc.).  13 half-hour videocassettes using excellent live ac­tresses are still shown on TV on the Disney Channel and were available at video stores until they went out of print.  Additionally, between sum­mer 1992 and winter 1996 the Prodigy computer information service had a Baby-sitters Club bulletin board enabling BSC fans na­tionwide to correspond with each other on all sorts of BSC-related subjects by computer mail.  The popularity of the BSC among young girls launched the books and everything related to the books into a mer­chandising empire.  (It is believed that sales have diminished steadily since peaking about 1992, and sales plummeted when the Forever Friends series replaced the original series, because it turned out that readers did not like the change.  The last time a BSC book appeared on the best-seller list was in sum­mer 1994, when Super Special 11 made it).  A full-length movie starring Sissy Spacek’s daughter Schuyler Fisk was re­leased in the summer of 1995.  (Funniest line in the movie:  Stacey is talking to her boyfriend Luca about the fol­lowing sum­mer and says, “I’ll be 14!”  Of course, fans of the BSC knew that no BSC member would ever turn 14.)

 

The books came out one each month during most of the run with every sixth book or so being an extra-long “Super Special,” usually involving all the girls together off on vacation away from home.  Each regular book was written in the first per­son by the girl whose name is in the title; however, the Super Specials were written in the first person chapter by chap­ter by different characters.  For those who read the whole BSC series relig­iously, the first two or three chapters of each book sometimes seem tedious as the author rehashes in detail each girl’s personality plus the way the club is run.  (Although the series is completely chronological--as is usually the case when one author does a whole series--this rehashing has to be done of course with the assumption that kids are not necessarily going to begin reading the series with book 1, and this way they can jump into the se­ries with any book and immediately have an idea of who the characters are and how the club was started.)  Be­ginning in late 1995 the books were reissued randomly through the first 88 books with new covers and a few additional trivia pages to match the format of books 89-131.  (Very clever on Scholastic’s part, as the ob­sessive-compulsive col­lectors like me had to go out and re-buy all the books simply because of those new pages!)  There were also 36 BSC Mystery books, six per year, in addition to the regular books--which were as good if not even better than the regular books--and there were also Special Edition Readers’ Re­quest books about Lo­gan and Shannon.  Portrait Collection books came out for the six older sitters, describing autobiog­raphically their lives prior to joining the BSC.  There was also a spin-off series about Kristy’s 7-year-old step­sister Karen called Baby-sitters Little Sister, which in turn spun off from itself a series about Karen’s school class at Stoney­brook Acad­emy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                TOTAL TALLY                                                                                    BIRTHDAYS

 

                BSC                                        131                                                          Logan                                     January 10

                Super Specials                        15                                                          Dawn                                      February 5

                Mysteries                                36                                                          Shannon                                                March 8

                Super Mysteries                       4                                                          Stacey                                    April 3

                Readers’ Request                     3                                                          Mallory                                  May 2

                Portrait Collection                    6                                                          Jessi                                       June 30

                California Diaries                    15                                                          Claudia                                   July 11

                Little Sister                            122                                                          Kristy                                     August 20

                Super Specials                          6                                                          Mary Anne                           September 22

                Ms. Colman’s Class               12                                                          Abby                                      October 15

                Friends Forever                    _14

                Total                                       364                                          Birthdays submitted by Katie Geoghegan  

                                                                                                                pronounced “gay-g’n”), of Great Falls, Montana,

                                                                                                                the BSC’s best teenage fan.  Thanks, Katie!

 

 

                My Favorite BSC Books                                                                   My Least Favorite BSC Books

 

1.  Mallory and the Ghost Cat  (Mystery 3)                                     1.  Kristy and the Copycat  (74)

2.  Baby-sitters’ Summer Vacation  (Super Special 2)                     2.  Mary Anne’s Bad Luck Mystery  (17)

3.  Kristy and the Secret of Susan  (32)                                            3.  Jessi’s Horrible Prank  (75)

4.  Mary Anne and the Secret in the Attic  (Mystery 5)                4.  Stacey and the Missing Ring  (Mystery 1)

5.  Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook  (35)                           5.  Kristy for President  (53)

 

                                                                                                                (This list does not include Friends Forever)

 

 

Trivia from the final book, Graduation Day

 

There were 213 Baby-sitters Club books, not including spinoffs.  This total is comprised of 145 BSC, 40 Mystery, and 28 Super Specials, Portrait Collections, and Readers' Requests.  If one each of these books were stacked, the pile would be seven and a half feet high.  There are over 31,000 pages, and it would take 22 days to read them, reading day and night at one minute per page.

 

The first book, Kristy's Great Idea, had a print run of 35,000 books.  By fall 1987, the books were regularly hitting #1 on the best-seller charts.  In April 1989, which is when I began reading the series, there were 9 BSC books in the B. Dalton Top 20.  10 of the top 16 sellers for the year 1991 in Publishers Weekly were BSC books, each selling 300,000 copies.

 

Book 34, Mary Anne and Too Many Boys, sold 800,000 copies in 8 months, to be one of the fastest-selling BSC books ever.

 

BSC books in print:

             March 1990:  20 million.

             January 1993:  50 million.

             July 1994:  100 million.

             Spring 1999:  150 million.

             November 2000:  180 million.