I always wanted to be Stacey from the Baby-sitters Club. Kristy was too bossy. I knew I wasn’t cool enough to be artistic, funky, junk-food loving, pre-hipster Claudia. But Stacey I could aspire to. Stylish and sophisticated, the treasurer of the Baby-sitters Club dated high school boys, was good at math, grew up in New York City, AND had the fabulous luck of being an only sibling. Stacey got her hair permed and dotted all her “I”s with hearts and had diabetes, which all combined to make her kind of glamorous. However, like most fervent fans, in reality I was more of a Mary Anne, the club’s meticulous secretary—bookish and shy and sensitive and a good listener (that exact description probably appeared somewhere on my fourth grade report card).
Last Thursday, Scholastic released The Summer Before, a prequel to Ann M. Martin’s Baby-sitters Club series—with 176 million books in print, one of the most successful series in publishing history. The Summer Before follows Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey through the summer before seventh grade—when the club was created in the original series’ first book, Kristy’s Great Idea. Kristy grapples with her parents’ divorce, Mary Anne struggles with her overprotective father, Claudia has her first major crush (on a ninth grader!), and Stacey moves to town from New York, where her best friend turned on her after she developed diabetes.
