[interesting] baby-sitters club
In the other window, I'm writing gay (male) porn. In this window? BSC love.
BSC.
Okay, quick intro. The Baby-Sitters Club is a series of books about these middle school girls who run a baby-sitting business/club in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, USA. The series was originally conceived of as a four-book deal by God Ann M. Martin, a sweet, shy twentysomething author who'd done lots of baby-sitting as a girl in Princeton, New Jersey, gone to Smith College, taught for a year, worked as an editor for a bit, and originally got to write fulltime in her NYC apartment, where she lived with a succession of cats.
Four books, four awesome girls, one great idea. It was 1986.
Needless to say (it is needless, right?) the idea caught on, the deal got bigger, and changes happened:
+Most of the books were ghostwritten. Ann still did brainstorming, outlining, and theoretically fine-tooth-combing (I swear she had nothing to do with Kristy and the Baby Parade though) on all the books. She also wrote some of them -- the ones that were most important to her, presumably -- herself.
+The series got spin-offs. In addition to the regular series, there are Super Specials (which slide into regular series canon), mysteries (which have a semi-self-contained canon of their own in addition to feeding regular series canon), Super Mysteries (which fit into Mystery canon, apparently), Baby-Sitter's Little Sister (which is about one of the baby-sitter's little... okay, sometimes it REALLY IS that self-explanatory. Though, trufax, when I was a kid I thought it would be a series about Karen AND Vanessa, Becca, Margo and Claire. Not to mention Emily Michelle. Talk about unfair. Anyhow, the Little Sister books also fit into regular series canon and are intended for an even younger audience), the Portrait Collection (autobiographies of most of the main characters -- seriously good stuff in here, in a totally non-ironic way. These books have made me cry), the California Diaries series (which was NOT listed in my interests until two seconds ago because come on, I really need to devote a full entry just to the awesome that is Ducky. Anyhow, CA Diaries. Made of awesome, don't feed into regular BSC continuity, major retcons of frelling DOOM I am not kidding), and Friends Forever (which I haven't read. They were written towards the end of the BSC epoch and I understand that they form the end of canon). There are also a couple of bonus books floating around out there. Basically, it's a cult with a seriously large holy book. The most essential book of all is The Complete Guide to the Baby-Sitters Club, which I consult on an almost daily basis. It only goes up to ~#100, though, and doesn't cover Little Sister or CA Diaries canon).
+Ann met Paula Danziger (with whom she cowrote a couple of non-BSC books), who lived in upstate New York, and fell in love with the region herself. She now lives somewhere in upstate New York with a collection of cats and dogs.
Ann stopped writing BSC books (and all the spin-off series) in 2000. Most of the books are no longer in print, but you can buy many online, swap 'em with friends, steal them from teenage girls who think they're too old for them, buy them at used booksales, or borrow them from your local library. The first few books in the series have also been transformed into graphic novels by Raina Telgemeier, and you can buy those at your regular ol' bookseller.
Okay, so that's a lot of trivia -- what is the BSC? What made it so popular? What's up with the freakish adult fans of the BSC? Why did I love it, and why do I still?
Okay, first, what is it? It's a series of books. They're short. They're formulaic. They're about baby-sitters. They're rated strictly G. They're about middle school students, the reading level on the back is 4, and they were designed to be read by pre-teens. They're about kid issues -- sibling rivalry, learning disabilities, sports, pets, divorce, some boring mild heterosexual dating, some innocent crushes, some nasty pranks. Some super serious issues (eating disorders, racism, drunk driving) end up in the books -- characters do die, parents do get divorced, nobody's perfect -- but they aren't super serious books. They are, like I said, strictly G-rated material with an occasional after school special.
The main focus of the books is the baby-sitters themselves. There are... four five four six seven six and a half ~seven sitters in the club at any given time. Eight narrators, spread over 100+ books (this is not including the Super Specials, or assorted miscellaneous books). They all have their own stories involving troubles with school, boys, family, illness, and just about anything else that could be of interest to a teen or preteen straight girl. They're all good friends, but they fight occasionally, have jealousies and rivalries, misunderstand each other, don't grok each other.
But really, if you want to know who the baby-sitters are and what they do, read chapters 2-3 of any BSC book and you will learn all you need to know. Any. Seriously.
The other weird awesome thing about the BSC is that they don't age. It's like those old comic strips, e.g. Family Circus. They're in eighth grade. FOREVER. (Actually, as I keep having to remind my girlfriend, they DO age. Most of the main characters are in seventh grade in book 1. In book 9, they're in eight grade. And in eighth grade they shall remain. FOREVER.
For me, those two things (the second chapter device and the never aging magic) and all the other quirks of the BSCverse make it just more magically delicious. Yes, I sometimes skipped/skip chapter 2, especially if I've been mainlining the books. And yes, they have been known to make me whine and moan to dad or the kidlet. But ultimately, in my heart? I love them.
That's the thing about my (adult) love of the BSC. It's so trashy, so formulaic, so trite, so predictable, so preteen that I... kind of adore it in all its trashy, formulaic, trite, predicable preteeniness. I'm going to tell my whole Story Of Me And the Baby-Sitters Club, but the first memory I have of using the BSC as braincandy is this: I was probably ten or so, and I read the Anne of Green Gables series for the first time. I finished Rilla of Ingleside at three in the morning and my heart was worn out from [tragic thing that happens in Rilla], and I needed the lightest, fluffiest book I could just to make my brain stop being so distraught. So I read Stacey and the Cheerleaders [BSC # 70, which is, by a totally unplanned coincidence, sitting next to me on the couch at this very moment]. I mean. It's got baby-sitters. It's got cheerleading. How much fluffier can you get?
Okay, I promised you my history with the BSC. It's a lifelong journey of love. I read my first BSC book quite young -- I think it was the summer between first and second grade, since I had just read my first chapter book [James and the Giant Peach, not trashy baby-sitting filth] and suddenly the whole library was open to me. That first book was Mary Anne Saves the Day [#4], which remains one of my favorites because it hooked me. I started reading the books religiously, as many as I could lay my hands on. It must've been in this period that I started playacting BSC all by my lonesome (with a [play] yellow rotary telephone, and my very own bed pretending to be Claudia's) and asked my mom to buy me Claudia-like clothes -- my favorite baby-sitter was Mary Anne, but Claudia was the coolest dresser. I have a ton of answers to the "first fandom?" question, but BSC was the first fandom I attempted cosplay in. And so much more.
When I moved from Massachusetts to New Jersey towards the beginning of second grade, a girl [and sometime baby-sitter of mine!] from church gifted me with her collection, which she was too old for [see what I mean by conning teens into giving you their BSC books? Works every time]. I continued to read BSC books throughout elementary school. I borrowed them from the library, bought them new, reread the ones I owned, basically memorized the plots.... I remember writing an elaborate futurefic in my head one summer, playing in the pool and thinking, "Hmm... and then Dawn lives on a desert island, and Kristy's a lesbian, and..."
When I was in fourth grade, I had a teacher who gently suggested that maybe I was a wee bit old (and too good a reader) for the BSC, but I continued to supplement my diet of classics and schoolbooks with crunchy baby-sitting goodness until sixth grade, when I gave them up for Lent.
Yep. Whole 'verse, cold turkey (except the CA Diaries, because those were written on a sixth grade reading level and thus Didn't Count), never looked back didn't look back for a long time.
I think it was an excellent decision for me to stop when I did. I loved the books, but I was getting old for them -- specifically, I was getting perilously close to the age that the baby-sitters were. I was twelve; they were thirteen -- soon I would be Claudia's age. And Kristy's and Mary Anne's and Stacey's and Dawn's and Abby's. And that's just not right.
The girls always felt older to me -- hugely older, glamorously older, maturely older. This was before I developed a decided sexual preference for older women -- right before -- and the BSC girls were definitely who I wanted to be, not who I wanted to frell. Getting to their age was just impossible -- it would ruin the fantasy, destroy the role models, the heroes -- it would have been too painful to slowly watch them getting younger as I got older, to watch them become the (sometimes) bratty, stupid, immature girls that they were. To realize that I wasn't marvelously cool and independent at thirteen, to get progressively more frustrated with the grade 4 reading level... it would have been too sad for me, and ruined the books forever. So I stopped. Started reading my mom's theology texts and other very adult books, read other kinds of trash. Until college.
So after giving them up for Lent in sixth grade, I picked the BSC up again my junior year of college because -- why else -- there was a BSC ficathon on LJ. [As most of you know, I went to college early, so the period of abstinence was six years, not nine.] My adult readings of the BSC have always been explicitly fannish -- that is, reading for subtext, reading for femslash, reading with fanfiction in mind. I read them 'ironically' -- which is hard to claim when you find yourself in tears over a book -- and I enjoy them unironically.
I take the BSC books seriously. They are, yes, wonderfully marvelously fantastically trashy, fantastical, formulaic, etc. There's a lot that's easy to spork, and I love a good sporking. But I tend to avoid sites and comms that just spork, because I love the BSC books with my whole frelling heart. I've got two whole shelves of BSC books looking at me right now, wonderful glorious much-loved books that have been passed down from my church friend to me to my sister and then back to me, books I bought with my own allowance, books my girlfriend bought used for me, books that piperrhiannon and tartanshell sent me, books with the covers torn off and bent because they've been so well-loved. And you know what? I friggin' love these books.
I don't know why I loved them as a kid. I can make some guesses, but I can't remember what it felt like to love them, and I never thought about it -- I just did. People love formulaic books because they're easy, familiar, predictable. We love romance because we know the heroines are going to end up together; I love baby-sitting adventures because I know the problems are going to be solved, the friendships healed, the miscommunications righted. If not in this book, then two or ten books later. But everyone does live happily ever after.
As an adult I love the baby-sitting plots more than I ever did as a kid. I love the baby-sitting charges, who are cute and funny and genuine, bratty and undisciplined, weird and awesome. I love Jamie Newton, his bicycle, and his baby sister, Mariah and Gabby Perkins and their too-perfect performances, the Korman kids who are afraid of the Toilet Monster, Nina and Eleanor Marshall, Haley Braddock... all the kids. I love that all the baby-sitters are good with kids, each in her own way. How Kristy really groks child psychology, how Claudia always prescribes art therapy, how Mallory brings years of experience to the job, how Stacey's utterly unflappable and not afraid to look like a freak in front of her charges.
I love the family relationships in the books. I've been vocally and actively asking for Richard/Sharon fic for the past couple of years because they remind me of my parents, yeah, but also because I really admire the way they did make their relationship work, despite the issuerifficness. I love that all the parents are real people with real jobs, insecurities, hangups, character development. All the girls' parents (except Kristy's dad) are pretty good parents, but they're not perfect. They grow, they learn, they change, and they make mistakes. They aren't absent from the scene at all. And the relationships among the sitters and their sibs are loving and fraught, just like real sib-sib relations.
I love Mary Anne. I love all the baby-sitters, maybe more now than I did when I was a kid, but I LOVE Mary Anne. I love Mary Anne Saves the Day in this visceral way, because it's about this shy, pigtailed twelve-year old girl WHO SAVES THE DAY. Mary Anne's a goddamn HERO and nothing's ever going to change that.
And, as y'all know, I love the friendships among the baby-sitters. I love that this series is friggin' made for femslash. That there are these wonderful, close friendships between and among these girls, that there's this awesome caring and love and sympathy, that there are these best friends who deal with jealousy and lies and secrets and scars and frigging LOVE each other, canonically, in so many ways. I mean, Bechdel Test? Every single book passes. I love sappy angsty teenage romances lots and lots. I'm a big Princess Diaries fan. But I love these totally not-romantic (pre)teen entrepreneurial-adventure books too, even the ones that do have het romances, because the female friendships are always more important than the het romances, and when they aren't, everyone suffers. It's something I love as a dyke, and even though the girls only have het relationships, I can totally sympathize with the way they feel about each other.
One more thing: I love Ann M. Martin. She's an okay writer (actually, as a Newbury Honoree, possibly I can say she's a good writer, though the BSC books don't really showcase her talent), but from everything I've read, she's a wonderful person. She's quiet and shy, loves sewing and writing and animals and children, lives (apparently alone) in upstate New York, has a wide circle of friends and relations, and seems really to care about the kids who read her books.
I really hope she's gay. 'Cos, see, this is my BSC-pimping post, not a generic one for crack_van or wherever. And part of my love of the BSC is my love of Ann, and part of my love of Ann is my conviction she's gay. Why? I don't know. I'm not really attracted to her and we'd be really incompatible (she's a morning person and a vegetarian, among other things), so it's not about that -- it's sort of about having a role model, I guess, and about having someone who was so important in my growing up -- and given how important the BSC was to me as a kid, Ann was important too -- happen to be gay -- as well as smart and sweet and shy and a writer -- gives me a lizardheart thrill. Ann's shy and private, and her romantic life is not her fans' business, and this is where it's not RPF but actual tin... I dunno? be-collied baseball cap doesn't exactly have the right ring to it; call it my tinhat then -- yeah. I'm a bit tinhatty about Ann -- and the hearsay I hear (and there's a bit of it) doesn't help, but it makes me happy to think that Ann's quietly happy with her female partner.
So yes. I love the BSC and just about everything about it.
Longtime fan? My go-to comms are bsclove for general BSC femslash and short_takes for bi-weekly femslash ficathons (I founded the comm, but the benevolent midnightwriting is running it now).
Wanna get into the series as an adult? Well, that's kinda tough. I don't think I'd love the books as much as I do if I hadn't loved them so devotedly as a kid. But there's hope! If you're a comic book fan, why not check out the new graphic novels? Same wonderful story, updated to a modern format. (And you can scan all the femslashy bits for me.)
If you want to try the series old-school... well, you could read #1, but you really don't need to. There is continuity in the BSC, despite what people might say, but there's also a handy recap in ch2 if you missed anything. So head to your local library, find the kids' section, and try something that looks interesting. Claudia and Mean Janine [#7] and Claudia and the Sad Goodbye [#26] are about Claudia and her aging grandmother. Stacey's Emergency [#43] is about the difficulties of coping with a chronic illness as a young teen. Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street [#49] has a fabulous baby-sitting plot about a gifted girl. Mallory Hates Boys (And Gym) [#59] is about how Mallory Pike realizes that being a lesbian doesn't mean you need to be butch.... okay, that's not actually the plot. But it's still a good book. If you want to get in on the awesomeness that is Stacey/Charlotte (warning: this pairing is baby-sitter/charge so there's an age and power gap. It's also insanely frigging canon), check out Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook [#35] which I promise you is so femslashy you won't believe it. And if you want my real, honest recommendation? See if you can find some Portrait Collection books. They're the autobiographies of most of the girls, and they're well-crafted, self-contained, excellent introductions to the characters, and total tearjerkers if you're a softie like me (yep, it was a PC book that made me cry). Mary Anne's, Claudia's, and Abby's stand out in my memory as especially excellent. For more along those lines, try The Baby-Sitters Remember [Super Special #11] -- it's got more great character moments.
Don't blame me if you get hooked.
BSC.
Okay, quick intro. The Baby-Sitters Club is a series of books about these middle school girls who run a baby-sitting business/club in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, USA. The series was originally conceived of as a four-book deal by God Ann M. Martin, a sweet, shy twentysomething author who'd done lots of baby-sitting as a girl in Princeton, New Jersey, gone to Smith College, taught for a year, worked as an editor for a bit, and originally got to write fulltime in her NYC apartment, where she lived with a succession of cats.
Four books, four awesome girls, one great idea. It was 1986.
Needless to say (it is needless, right?) the idea caught on, the deal got bigger, and changes happened:
+Most of the books were ghostwritten. Ann still did brainstorming, outlining, and theoretically fine-tooth-combing (I swear she had nothing to do with Kristy and the Baby Parade though) on all the books. She also wrote some of them -- the ones that were most important to her, presumably -- herself.
+The series got spin-offs. In addition to the regular series, there are Super Specials (which slide into regular series canon), mysteries (which have a semi-self-contained canon of their own in addition to feeding regular series canon), Super Mysteries (which fit into Mystery canon, apparently), Baby-Sitter's Little Sister (which is about one of the baby-sitter's little... okay, sometimes it REALLY IS that self-explanatory. Though, trufax, when I was a kid I thought it would be a series about Karen AND Vanessa, Becca, Margo and Claire. Not to mention Emily Michelle. Talk about unfair. Anyhow, the Little Sister books also fit into regular series canon and are intended for an even younger audience), the Portrait Collection (autobiographies of most of the main characters -- seriously good stuff in here, in a totally non-ironic way. These books have made me cry), the California Diaries series (which was NOT listed in my interests until two seconds ago because come on, I really need to devote a full entry just to the awesome that is Ducky. Anyhow, CA Diaries. Made of awesome, don't feed into regular BSC continuity, major retcons of frelling DOOM I am not kidding), and Friends Forever (which I haven't read. They were written towards the end of the BSC epoch and I understand that they form the end of canon). There are also a couple of bonus books floating around out there. Basically, it's a cult with a seriously large holy book. The most essential book of all is The Complete Guide to the Baby-Sitters Club, which I consult on an almost daily basis. It only goes up to ~#100, though, and doesn't cover Little Sister or CA Diaries canon).
+Ann met Paula Danziger (with whom she cowrote a couple of non-BSC books), who lived in upstate New York, and fell in love with the region herself. She now lives somewhere in upstate New York with a collection of cats and dogs.
Ann stopped writing BSC books (and all the spin-off series) in 2000. Most of the books are no longer in print, but you can buy many online, swap 'em with friends, steal them from teenage girls who think they're too old for them, buy them at used booksales, or borrow them from your local library. The first few books in the series have also been transformed into graphic novels by Raina Telgemeier, and you can buy those at your regular ol' bookseller.
Okay, so that's a lot of trivia -- what is the BSC? What made it so popular? What's up with the freakish adult fans of the BSC? Why did I love it, and why do I still?
Okay, first, what is it? It's a series of books. They're short. They're formulaic. They're about baby-sitters. They're rated strictly G. They're about middle school students, the reading level on the back is 4, and they were designed to be read by pre-teens. They're about kid issues -- sibling rivalry, learning disabilities, sports, pets, divorce, some boring mild heterosexual dating, some innocent crushes, some nasty pranks. Some super serious issues (eating disorders, racism, drunk driving) end up in the books -- characters do die, parents do get divorced, nobody's perfect -- but they aren't super serious books. They are, like I said, strictly G-rated material with an occasional after school special.
The main focus of the books is the baby-sitters themselves. There are... four five four six seven six and a half ~seven sitters in the club at any given time. Eight narrators, spread over 100+ books (this is not including the Super Specials, or assorted miscellaneous books). They all have their own stories involving troubles with school, boys, family, illness, and just about anything else that could be of interest to a teen or preteen straight girl. They're all good friends, but they fight occasionally, have jealousies and rivalries, misunderstand each other, don't grok each other.
But really, if you want to know who the baby-sitters are and what they do, read chapters 2-3 of any BSC book and you will learn all you need to know. Any. Seriously.
The other weird awesome thing about the BSC is that they don't age. It's like those old comic strips, e.g. Family Circus. They're in eighth grade. FOREVER. (Actually, as I keep having to remind my girlfriend, they DO age. Most of the main characters are in seventh grade in book 1. In book 9, they're in eight grade. And in eighth grade they shall remain. FOREVER.
For me, those two things (the second chapter device and the never aging magic) and all the other quirks of the BSCverse make it just more magically delicious. Yes, I sometimes skipped/skip chapter 2, especially if I've been mainlining the books. And yes, they have been known to make me whine and moan to dad or the kidlet. But ultimately, in my heart? I love them.
That's the thing about my (adult) love of the BSC. It's so trashy, so formulaic, so trite, so predictable, so preteen that I... kind of adore it in all its trashy, formulaic, trite, predicable preteeniness. I'm going to tell my whole Story Of Me And the Baby-Sitters Club, but the first memory I have of using the BSC as braincandy is this: I was probably ten or so, and I read the Anne of Green Gables series for the first time. I finished Rilla of Ingleside at three in the morning and my heart was worn out from [tragic thing that happens in Rilla], and I needed the lightest, fluffiest book I could just to make my brain stop being so distraught. So I read Stacey and the Cheerleaders [BSC # 70, which is, by a totally unplanned coincidence, sitting next to me on the couch at this very moment]. I mean. It's got baby-sitters. It's got cheerleading. How much fluffier can you get?
Okay, I promised you my history with the BSC. It's a lifelong journey of love. I read my first BSC book quite young -- I think it was the summer between first and second grade, since I had just read my first chapter book [James and the Giant Peach, not trashy baby-sitting filth] and suddenly the whole library was open to me. That first book was Mary Anne Saves the Day [#4], which remains one of my favorites because it hooked me. I started reading the books religiously, as many as I could lay my hands on. It must've been in this period that I started playacting BSC all by my lonesome (with a [play] yellow rotary telephone, and my very own bed pretending to be Claudia's) and asked my mom to buy me Claudia-like clothes -- my favorite baby-sitter was Mary Anne, but Claudia was the coolest dresser. I have a ton of answers to the "first fandom?" question, but BSC was the first fandom I attempted cosplay in. And so much more.
When I moved from Massachusetts to New Jersey towards the beginning of second grade, a girl [and sometime baby-sitter of mine!] from church gifted me with her collection, which she was too old for [see what I mean by conning teens into giving you their BSC books? Works every time]. I continued to read BSC books throughout elementary school. I borrowed them from the library, bought them new, reread the ones I owned, basically memorized the plots.... I remember writing an elaborate futurefic in my head one summer, playing in the pool and thinking, "Hmm... and then Dawn lives on a desert island, and Kristy's a lesbian, and..."
When I was in fourth grade, I had a teacher who gently suggested that maybe I was a wee bit old (and too good a reader) for the BSC, but I continued to supplement my diet of classics and schoolbooks with crunchy baby-sitting goodness until sixth grade, when I gave them up for Lent.
Yep. Whole 'verse, cold turkey (except the CA Diaries, because those were written on a sixth grade reading level and thus Didn't Count), never looked back didn't look back for a long time.
I think it was an excellent decision for me to stop when I did. I loved the books, but I was getting old for them -- specifically, I was getting perilously close to the age that the baby-sitters were. I was twelve; they were thirteen -- soon I would be Claudia's age. And Kristy's and Mary Anne's and Stacey's and Dawn's and Abby's. And that's just not right.
The girls always felt older to me -- hugely older, glamorously older, maturely older. This was before I developed a decided sexual preference for older women -- right before -- and the BSC girls were definitely who I wanted to be, not who I wanted to frell. Getting to their age was just impossible -- it would ruin the fantasy, destroy the role models, the heroes -- it would have been too painful to slowly watch them getting younger as I got older, to watch them become the (sometimes) bratty, stupid, immature girls that they were. To realize that I wasn't marvelously cool and independent at thirteen, to get progressively more frustrated with the grade 4 reading level... it would have been too sad for me, and ruined the books forever. So I stopped. Started reading my mom's theology texts and other very adult books, read other kinds of trash. Until college.
So after giving them up for Lent in sixth grade, I picked the BSC up again my junior year of college because -- why else -- there was a BSC ficathon on LJ. [As most of you know, I went to college early, so the period of abstinence was six years, not nine.] My adult readings of the BSC have always been explicitly fannish -- that is, reading for subtext, reading for femslash, reading with fanfiction in mind. I read them 'ironically' -- which is hard to claim when you find yourself in tears over a book -- and I enjoy them unironically.
I take the BSC books seriously. They are, yes, wonderfully marvelously fantastically trashy, fantastical, formulaic, etc. There's a lot that's easy to spork, and I love a good sporking. But I tend to avoid sites and comms that just spork, because I love the BSC books with my whole frelling heart. I've got two whole shelves of BSC books looking at me right now, wonderful glorious much-loved books that have been passed down from my church friend to me to my sister and then back to me, books I bought with my own allowance, books my girlfriend bought used for me, books that piperrhiannon and tartanshell sent me, books with the covers torn off and bent because they've been so well-loved. And you know what? I friggin' love these books.
I don't know why I loved them as a kid. I can make some guesses, but I can't remember what it felt like to love them, and I never thought about it -- I just did. People love formulaic books because they're easy, familiar, predictable. We love romance because we know the heroines are going to end up together; I love baby-sitting adventures because I know the problems are going to be solved, the friendships healed, the miscommunications righted. If not in this book, then two or ten books later. But everyone does live happily ever after.
As an adult I love the baby-sitting plots more than I ever did as a kid. I love the baby-sitting charges, who are cute and funny and genuine, bratty and undisciplined, weird and awesome. I love Jamie Newton, his bicycle, and his baby sister, Mariah and Gabby Perkins and their too-perfect performances, the Korman kids who are afraid of the Toilet Monster, Nina and Eleanor Marshall, Haley Braddock... all the kids. I love that all the baby-sitters are good with kids, each in her own way. How Kristy really groks child psychology, how Claudia always prescribes art therapy, how Mallory brings years of experience to the job, how Stacey's utterly unflappable and not afraid to look like a freak in front of her charges.
I love the family relationships in the books. I've been vocally and actively asking for Richard/Sharon fic for the past couple of years because they remind me of my parents, yeah, but also because I really admire the way they did make their relationship work, despite the issuerifficness. I love that all the parents are real people with real jobs, insecurities, hangups, character development. All the girls' parents (except Kristy's dad) are pretty good parents, but they're not perfect. They grow, they learn, they change, and they make mistakes. They aren't absent from the scene at all. And the relationships among the sitters and their sibs are loving and fraught, just like real sib-sib relations.
I love Mary Anne. I love all the baby-sitters, maybe more now than I did when I was a kid, but I LOVE Mary Anne. I love Mary Anne Saves the Day in this visceral way, because it's about this shy, pigtailed twelve-year old girl WHO SAVES THE DAY. Mary Anne's a goddamn HERO and nothing's ever going to change that.
And, as y'all know, I love the friendships among the baby-sitters. I love that this series is friggin' made for femslash. That there are these wonderful, close friendships between and among these girls, that there's this awesome caring and love and sympathy, that there are these best friends who deal with jealousy and lies and secrets and scars and frigging LOVE each other, canonically, in so many ways. I mean, Bechdel Test? Every single book passes. I love sappy angsty teenage romances lots and lots. I'm a big Princess Diaries fan. But I love these totally not-romantic (pre)teen entrepreneurial-adventure books too, even the ones that do have het romances, because the female friendships are always more important than the het romances, and when they aren't, everyone suffers. It's something I love as a dyke, and even though the girls only have het relationships, I can totally sympathize with the way they feel about each other.
One more thing: I love Ann M. Martin. She's an okay writer (actually, as a Newbury Honoree, possibly I can say she's a good writer, though the BSC books don't really showcase her talent), but from everything I've read, she's a wonderful person. She's quiet and shy, loves sewing and writing and animals and children, lives (apparently alone) in upstate New York, has a wide circle of friends and relations, and seems really to care about the kids who read her books.
I really hope she's gay. 'Cos, see, this is my BSC-pimping post, not a generic one for crack_van or wherever. And part of my love of the BSC is my love of Ann, and part of my love of Ann is my conviction she's gay. Why? I don't know. I'm not really attracted to her and we'd be really incompatible (she's a morning person and a vegetarian, among other things), so it's not about that -- it's sort of about having a role model, I guess, and about having someone who was so important in my growing up -- and given how important the BSC was to me as a kid, Ann was important too -- happen to be gay -- as well as smart and sweet and shy and a writer -- gives me a lizardheart thrill. Ann's shy and private, and her romantic life is not her fans' business, and this is where it's not RPF but actual tin... I dunno? be-collied baseball cap doesn't exactly have the right ring to it; call it my tinhat then -- yeah. I'm a bit tinhatty about Ann -- and the hearsay I hear (and there's a bit of it) doesn't help, but it makes me happy to think that Ann's quietly happy with her female partner.
So yes. I love the BSC and just about everything about it.
Longtime fan? My go-to comms are bsclove for general BSC femslash and short_takes for bi-weekly femslash ficathons (I founded the comm, but the benevolent midnightwriting is running it now).
Wanna get into the series as an adult? Well, that's kinda tough. I don't think I'd love the books as much as I do if I hadn't loved them so devotedly as a kid. But there's hope! If you're a comic book fan, why not check out the new graphic novels? Same wonderful story, updated to a modern format. (And you can scan all the femslashy bits for me.)
If you want to try the series old-school... well, you could read #1, but you really don't need to. There is continuity in the BSC, despite what people might say, but there's also a handy recap in ch2 if you missed anything. So head to your local library, find the kids' section, and try something that looks interesting. Claudia and Mean Janine [#7] and Claudia and the Sad Goodbye [#26] are about Claudia and her aging grandmother. Stacey's Emergency [#43] is about the difficulties of coping with a chronic illness as a young teen. Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street [#49] has a fabulous baby-sitting plot about a gifted girl. Mallory Hates Boys (And Gym) [#59] is about how Mallory Pike realizes that being a lesbian doesn't mean you need to be butch.... okay, that's not actually the plot. But it's still a good book. If you want to get in on the awesomeness that is Stacey/Charlotte (warning: this pairing is baby-sitter/charge so there's an age and power gap. It's also insanely frigging canon), check out Stacey and the Mystery of Stoneybrook [#35] which I promise you is so femslashy you won't believe it. And if you want my real, honest recommendation? See if you can find some Portrait Collection books. They're the autobiographies of most of the girls, and they're well-crafted, self-contained, excellent introductions to the characters, and total tearjerkers if you're a softie like me (yep, it was a PC book that made me cry). Mary Anne's, Claudia's, and Abby's stand out in my memory as especially excellent. For more along those lines, try The Baby-Sitters Remember [Super Special #11] -- it's got more great character moments.
Don't blame me if you get hooked.