Tiny Julie Would Have Read the Snot out of The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

Especially if you compare that to how much fun Grown-Up Julie has reading them!

I am pretty sure that The Baby-Sitters Club (and my grandma) gave me my terrible penchant for snarky gossip. Even as the 10- to 12-year-old that I was when I first read the novels, if I'd had another kid to talk about books with I would have happily snarked away about how bossy Kristy is, how disloyal Stacey can be, and what a pushover Mary Ann often is. Also, I didn't like Mallory, and I wasn't sad when she left the series.

But I LOVED The Baby-Sitters Club, and well after I'd graduated from its target age range, you could still find me on long evenings in the public library, trusted as a high school page to be the sole staffer in the basement children's department just because the library stayed open well after any reasonable child's bedtime, reading through a couple more Baby-Sitters Club novels in between straightening the picture books and using the staff pinback button maker for my own nefarious purposes.

I've written before about that magical year for reading that was 2016, when the kids discovered so many great books, like Percy Jackson, Warrior Cats, and the new graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitters Club, then drawn by Raina Telgemeier, still one of my favorite graphic novelists. I checked out every Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel as soon as it came to the library for quite a while, and read them as avidly as my younger kid did, but then she got VERY into listening to long chapter books on Playaway, became happily accustomed to searching the library catalog and requesting them for herself, and as I was kicked out of the kid book selection job, I forgot all about The Baby-Sitters Club.

Fast-forward to this summer, when some search term or other on the library catalog brought one of the newer graphic novels into my first ten search results, and I was all, "OMG! There are more Baby-Sitters Club books!", and I requested every single one.

So that's what I did during a recent stormy weekend. You don't need electricity to read The Baby-Sitters Club!

And remember how when I was a little kid I didn't have anyone to talk about books with? Well, motherhood fixed that problem for me, because my college student sat on the other end of the couch and burned through all these graphic novels with me, only looking up so we could cozily snark on all the kids... and, with my new adult perspective, their parents!

With my 46-year-old eyes, I'm kind of now coming to see that the flaws in each flawed character, combined with their extreme competence in their various academic, extracurricular, and career pursuits, IS the fascinating draw to this series, at least for me. Mary Ann lets her father walk all over her in an infuriating way, and can completely take over the childcare of both a baby and toddler simultaneously.  Stacey can be selfish and vain, but with a diabetes diagnosis and two major moves in about a year, wow is that kid resilient. Kristy is the world's biggest bossypants, and damn, she can organize the SHIT out of a backyard day camp!

Like, gee, do I personally happen to know anyone who considers themselves both deeply flawed in a lot of ways and also extremely competent in a lot of different ways?

Ahem.

I am also extremely impressed at how the series allows big changes. I read Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye on the couch, said, "Holy Shit, College Kid! You're not going to believe what they do to Stacey!," and flipped the book to her. She read it and said, "OMG WUT?!? What the hell?!?!" 

Spoiler alert: Stacey moves away! She's one of the central characters, but her dad's job gets transferred back to New York City and she just... moves away! And then in the next graphic novel, the kids are all, "We miss Stacey so much sigh," but, you know, Jessie's a ballet star and learns sign language and there's a whole thing with a ballet school clique and life goes on.

Like, how sad and what a bummer and it really sucks because Stacey's awesome but, at the same time, such is life, especially when you're a kid. People move away, and life goes on. It's probably great for kids to see that modeled and normalized. 

It's much the same with all the really flawed parenting, because I do think that a lot of these kids' parents suck quite a lot of the time. But... you're a kid, so what are you going to do? Even when your dad is being really unreasonable, he's the parent you've got to deal with, so if you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation, then you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation. If your mom is getting married and moving you abruptly out of the only home you've ever known you're probably extremely distraught but you're still going, so you might as well lean in and help out and rack up some good credit (Kristy's mom does NOT appreciate that kid nearly enough! One of my kids would STILL be rolling on the floor in utter hysterics if I'd tried to pull that on her!). 

In conclusion: am I about to go get on the pre-release list for the newest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, set to be released in October? 

Yes. Yes, I am. Although I'll probably wait to read it until my college kid is on a school break and can sit on the other end of the couch to read it right after me so we can gossip about it!