The stupid is about to be kicked up a notch or three. Get ready for every older-guy crush in the rest of the series to suddenly not other you anymore
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What happened to the second part? LJ keeps telling me the page is missing :(
- Curtis looked up and smiled. He is missing a tooth, which is something I just can’t stand. I mean, in adults. I am a firm believer in dentures. -
This angers me EVERY TIME I read the book. Mary Anne comes off as the most spoiled, condescending rich girl in a club/school/town of rich people when she thinks that; dentures aren’t exactly CHEAP, Mary Anne, something you might know if your life wasn’t practically perfect. Maybe a cook who works at a lodge (where parents are expected to pay whatever they want and the lodge’s elderly owners pay the rest) feeding eight hundred little snobs every day, doesn’t pay all that well, or maybe ridicule like yours has numbed him to insults on his appearance. Not everyone’s a self-conscious thirteen-year-old girl, and some people have bigger and better priorities.
(Sorry for the rant, but I know people in real life who work hard and have good jobs and still can’t afford dentures, even though they desperately need them - not in a cosmetic way, but in a practical way; there are foods they have to avoid, not to mention the constant pain and repeated infections they’re prone to. The fact that Mary Anne also wastes a paragraph insulting some old lady’s saggy earlobes just reinforces the fact that she’s a snob as shallow as a puddle.)
And even though Dawn and Mary Anne are both the worst characters in the series (in my opinion - one’s passive-aggressive in the most insensitive way, no matter how much she tries convincing everyone she cares about them, and always crying to get out of the trouble her own mouth gets her in, and the other can’t look past her own obsessions with personal health and the health of the planet to see that far from being the laid-back person we’re obviously supposed to believe she is, she’s constantly hyped up on her ‘fake’ sugar and trying to shove it, along with her opinions, down everyone’s throats) I have to side with Dawn on this one. She’s honestly having a rough time (is this the only book she was bullied in when she didn’t deserve it?) and she went to her best friend for comfort, and all Mary Anne can think about is her creepy, controlling boyfriend. And they’ve been separated for something like two days at this point?
I know I would seriously miss my fiancé if we were separated for more than fourteen hours at a time (and some of those work days feel really long), but I don’t think I’ve ever, ever, EVER started writing him six-page letters, doodling our names with interchangeable last names, and all the rest of the stereotypical “dumb teen girl in love” behaviour.
- Despite her age, Teensy was wearing blue jean overalls, a plaid shirt, and a paint-spattered baseball cap. -
That’s Kristy in seventy years; better let go of your prejudice, Mary Anne. And is Nannie the only old lady allowed to wear clothes she might find more comfortable than flowery dresses? (Coming from girls who wear Laura Ashley on cross-country plane rides, maybe I shouldn’t even question it.)
. . . I just checked, and if a Laura Ashley dress was worth $280 in 1985 (I used Google, since I wasn’t even born yet), it’d cost $655 this year! AMM can’t tell us the girls aren’t rich if they’re wearing fancy attire like that to on no special occasion and casually lending it to friends. I have to wonder if the sane parents in Stoneybrook made the girls buy those clothes themselves . . .
- This is when the above Dawn scene happens. As she sees it, Dawn picked a fight with her (I side with Dawn), and whines that Dawn accused [her] of being insensitive (because it’s the truth, Mary Anne!), and then says, “What a baby. Why did I ever think she was one of my best friends?” Well, Mary Anne, she DID forgive you when it became clear that you were using her to get back at Kristy when you first met her. -
I totally forgot that Dawn had to overcome the “She used me to get revenge on someone” hurdle! You’d think she would have realized way back then what awful friends the club was made of and start walking back to California, or at least reject the BSC’s membership offer when it was shoved at her.
You certainly sound productive, despite your fiancé’s absence - you’re the kind of role model we should all have read about as kids. :)
Pizza certificates . . . haha! I got three of those as a kid, and I kept them - I figured out at the age of six that if I used them, they’d be gone and I’d have no record of having won anything. One small pizza didn’t seem worth the loss to me.
I’m glad Claudia was given the “better skiier” status in the club, especially against Kristy. I don’t usually feel sorry for Claudia, since I loved school (see above BSC-style “I’m-not-bragging” story about awards, lol) and have little to no patience for people who have every chance to learn and just refuse to, but it’s nice to see the girl I could relate to when I had especially tough assignments win for a change.
I hate the phonetic (I hope that’s the right word) accents! And I hate the way they did the same thing for whenever some talked with a stuffed-up nose! I had awful allergies as a kid, so I heard way too much of allergy-dialect.
Looking back on it, these books might be why I gave my little sister such awful (a complete lack of, actually) advice when one of our parents’ middle-aged friends started hitting on her online, telling her all the while to keep it their secret. I saw nothing wrong with it, as someone who was just learning to use the internet and who had also been hit on (though by guys a lot closer to my age), and basically told my sister that that was just how guys were. Luckily, our big brother somehow saw the saved MSN chats and took it right to our parents. I know NOW that I should have done that, but I was reading these books nearly constantly and the idea of older guys with young girls didn’t seem at all unusual. If these things are ever re-released, they should come with a big, red-font disclaimer warning kids/parents about the inappropriate behaviour of adults, partly as a trigger warning but also so the super-sheltered kids like me don’t start thinking that stuff’s no big deal and something you can keep secret if you’re asked to.
- Curtis looked up and smiled. He is missing a tooth, which is something I just can’t stand. I mean, in adults. I am a firm believer in dentures. -
This angers me EVERY TIME I read the book. Mary Anne comes off as the most spoiled, condescending rich girl in a club/school/town of rich people when she thinks that; dentures aren’t exactly CHEAP, Mary Anne, something you might know if your life wasn’t practically perfect. Maybe a cook who works at a lodge (where parents are expected to pay whatever they want and the lodge’s elderly owners pay the rest) feeding eight hundred little snobs every day, doesn’t pay all that well, or maybe ridicule like yours has numbed him to insults on his appearance. Not everyone’s a self-conscious thirteen-year-old girl, and some people have bigger and better priorities.
(Sorry for the rant, but I know people in real life who work hard and have good jobs and still can’t afford dentures, even though they desperately need them - not in a cosmetic way, but in a practical way; there are foods they have to avoid, not to mention the constant pain and repeated infections they’re prone to. The fact that Mary Anne also wastes a paragraph insulting some old lady’s saggy earlobes just reinforces the fact that she’s a snob as shallow as a puddle.)
And even though Dawn and Mary Anne are both the worst characters in the series (in my opinion - one’s passive-aggressive in the most insensitive way, no matter how much she tries convincing everyone she cares about them, and always crying to get out of the trouble her own mouth gets her in, and the other can’t look past her own obsessions with personal health and the health of the planet to see that far from being the laid-back person we’re obviously supposed to believe she is, she’s constantly hyped up on her ‘fake’ sugar and trying to shove it, along with her opinions, down everyone’s throats) I have to side with Dawn on this one. She’s honestly having a rough time (is this the only book she was bullied in when she didn’t deserve it?) and she went to her best friend for comfort, and all Mary Anne can think about is her creepy, controlling boyfriend. And they’ve been separated for something like two days at this point?
I know I would seriously miss my fiancé if we were separated for more than fourteen hours at a time (and some of those work days feel really long), but I don’t think I’ve ever, ever, EVER started writing him six-page letters, doodling our names with interchangeable last names, and all the rest of the stereotypical “dumb teen girl in love” behaviour.
- Despite her age, Teensy was wearing blue jean overalls, a plaid shirt, and a paint-spattered baseball cap. -
That’s Kristy in seventy years; better let go of your prejudice, Mary Anne. And is Nannie the only old lady allowed to wear clothes she might find more comfortable than flowery dresses? (Coming from girls who wear Laura Ashley on cross-country plane rides, maybe I shouldn’t even question it.)
. . . I just checked, and if a Laura Ashley dress was worth $280 in 1985 (I used Google, since I wasn’t even born yet), it’d cost $655 this year! AMM can’t tell us the girls aren’t rich if they’re wearing fancy attire like that to on no special occasion and casually lending it to friends. I have to wonder if the sane parents in Stoneybrook made the girls buy those clothes themselves . . .
- This is when the above Dawn scene happens. As she sees it, Dawn picked a fight with her (I side with Dawn), and whines that Dawn accused [her] of being insensitive (because it’s the truth, Mary Anne!), and then says, “What a baby. Why did I ever think she was one of my best friends?” Well, Mary Anne, she DID forgive you when it became clear that you were using her to get back at Kristy when you first met her. -
I totally forgot that Dawn had to overcome the “She used me to get revenge on someone” hurdle! You’d think she would have realized way back then what awful friends the club was made of and start walking back to California, or at least reject the BSC’s membership offer when it was shoved at her.
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Pizza certificates . . . haha! I got three of those as a kid, and I kept them - I figured out at the age of six that if I used them, they’d be gone and I’d have no record of having won anything. One small pizza didn’t seem worth the loss to me.
I’m glad Claudia was given the “better skiier” status in the club, especially against Kristy. I don’t usually feel sorry for Claudia, since I loved school (see above BSC-style “I’m-not-bragging” story about awards, lol) and have little to no patience for people who have every chance to learn and just refuse to, but it’s nice to see the girl I could relate to when I had especially tough assignments win for a change.
I hate the phonetic (I hope that’s the right word) accents! And I hate the way they did the same thing for whenever some talked with a stuffed-up nose! I had awful allergies as a kid, so I heard way too much of allergy-dialect.
Looking back on it, these books might be why I gave my little sister such awful (a complete lack of, actually) advice when one of our parents’ middle-aged friends started hitting on her online, telling her all the while to keep it their secret. I saw nothing wrong with it, as someone who was just learning to use the internet and who had also been hit on (though by guys a lot closer to my age), and basically told my sister that that was just how guys were. Luckily, our big brother somehow saw the saved MSN chats and took it right to our parents. I know NOW that I should have done that, but I was reading these books nearly constantly and the idea of older guys with young girls didn’t seem at all unusual. If these things are ever re-released, they should come with a big, red-font disclaimer warning kids/parents about the inappropriate behaviour of adults, partly as a trigger warning but also so the super-sheltered kids like me don’t start thinking that stuff’s no big deal and something you can keep secret if you’re asked to.
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