Tuesday, August 4, 2009

#14 Hello, Mallory

Mallory Pike wears
Heart tights and a name jumper.
Alas! No sparkles.

Summary

Mallory is going to her first BSC meeting, and she's excited. Excited enough, in fact, to wear a jumper with her name on it and heart tights to school. The whole outift seems a little juvenile for a 6th grader who wants to seem mature enough to hang out with 8th graders, but whatever. Mallory tries to run into the girls before school that day so she can ever so casually talk to them, but it doesn't happen and she's almost late to class. When she gets there, surprise! There's a new girl in her homeroom. It's Jessi Ramsey, and Mallory is already hoping that they'll be besties forever. Not everyone is so excited to see Jessi, though. At lunch, Jessi is stuck eating by herself while other girls make fun of her. That would have been a really good time for Mal to go over and introduce herself, instead of just sitting there and listening to the gossip, especially if she wanted to be Jessi's best friend!

Later, it's time for meeting. Kristy lets Mal know in a notebook entry that she doesn't need to dress up, since no one else does. Mallory tries to impress the girls by telling them how she sat for 6 of her brothers and sisters by herself not long ago, when her parents were with Nicky in the emergency room. The sitters aren't impressed; they think Mal wasn't careful enough and that she should have prevented the accident. They're worried about hiring another irresponsible sitter, so they tell her that they'll only let her in the club if she takes a baby-sitting test, and goes on a trial sitting job with Claudia.

On the day of the test, Mal is so nervous that she leaves far earlier than she has to. Since she's got so much time, she decides to stop by Stacey's old house. Mary Anne told everyone at the last BSC meeting that a black family had moved in, and Mal wants to see if it's Jessi's. Sure enough, it is; Mal introduces herself to Jessi, Becca and Squirt, and she and Jessi bond over their shared love of horse stories until it's time for Mal to leave for the test. She finds all four girls in club headquarters, which makes her nervous all over again. The test is ridiculous; the questions are way beyond what a teenage (or almost teenage) baby-sitter would ever need to know, and Mallory ends up flunking.

Next up is Mallory's and Claudia's job with the Perkinses, and it doesn't go any better than the test did. Mallory manages to spill milk, drop a glass, offer the girls food to eat that they don't even have in the house, let Chewy inside even though she'd been told not to, and make Gabbie Perkins cry. It's not completely her fault, though; Claudia watches her like a hawk the whole time and makes her feel nervous and stupid. At the next club meeting, Claudia rates the sitting job three out of ten, and Kristy tells Mal that she can't join the club unless she passes another test. Mallory is having none of it, and stomps out, announcing that she's quitting. Too bad she wasn't officially a member yet...

The next day, Mallory is moping on the playground when she stumbles on Jessi, also moping. She tells Jessi about her problems with the BSC, and Jessi talks about the problems that she and her family are having with their neighbors. They decide to start their own baby sitting club, and go to Mal's after school for a planning session. They name the club Kids Incorporated (isn't that copywrighted or something?) and make up some fliers. They're a little concerned that no one will hire them because of their age (at least someone was), so they decide to sit together on every job. Their two for the price of one policy didn't exactly help them any; the only two jobs they get are for their own families. Meanwhile, the BSC still has more work than they know what to do with. They realize that they were unfair to Mallory, and they offer her another chance. Mallory won't go without Jessi, so the BSC agrees to give her a trial, too. Things go well, and the BSC now has 6 members. :)

Thoughts and Things

  • I'm pretty sure that I couldn't draw a picture of the digestive system from memory, and I've taken biology. I don't blame Mal for being thrown by that one!
  • I think I had heart tights when I was little....
  • Would it really have been that common in the late 80's for public school kids to be so against someone of another race? I find it hard to believe that kids would seriously have made fun of Jessi just because she's black.
  • The Pikes all have chestnut brown hair in this book...yet Mallory's hair is its familiar red on the cover.
  • This is the second cover in a row where Claudia looks really good. I can't help but wonder how old the models were, though.
  • In a departure from the BSC's typical pizza toasts, we get a Gummy Worm toast. Yum.

12 comments:

  1. The name jumper was so dorky! So was the I Heart Kids one from another book. Oh, Mallory.

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  2. I had my gallbladder removed last year, and I still don't know what the digestive system looks like. Also, it can't be stated enough that the test is ridiculous. If a child is having trouble with the digestive system, call the doctor! Or the parents! Or an ambulance and take them to the hospital! And if the parent doesn't tell you that the child has colic, what would really happen in the, like, two hours that the parent was away, if the sitter was attentive and tried to calm the baby?

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  3. I went to school in St. Louis, and we had a deseg program. The majority of the black students were bussed in from the city, and I only knew a handful of black students that actually lived in the county when I was in elementary school .
    The program was still going on when I left in 2003. (started kindergarden fall of 89)

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  4. w o w this comment is late but i had to revisit one of my favorite bsc books! i live on the south side of chicago in an irish-catholic neighborhood, and it's very hard for a black person to walk along the streets (i've been with black friends who have been yelled at) let alone go to a public school! i went to a gifted school in a black neighborhood, but it's still pretty bad in some areas.

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  5. omg will i never forget mallory's outfit to her first club meeting. like lol.

    this was actually a good book. especially when jessi comes in for the first time before she drones on about the whole black thing.

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  6. on the cover Mal's legs were so freaky they gave me nightmares

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  7. i like mallory. and if ariana grande can dress the way she does and be popular, i dont get why her outfit was considered lame. she was 11.

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  8. Eh, worst book up until this point. Mallory isn’t very interesting and I don’t like her as a narrator. I get she’s younger than the others, but man, she makes Claudia look mature. Lol I just don’t think Mallory is that interesting which is easy to see why Ann Martin thought of her the least as well. It’s odd because Mallory was foreshadowed to join the club since almost the beginning of the series.

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  9. The BSC was soooooo unfair! I wish I could jump in and defend Mallory.

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  10. Ok. I go to a Catholic school with 600 people and only 4 black kids. As far as I know, they aren’t made fun of. Maybe it is different today from the 80s. I think the only reason Jessi was made fun of is to get Mallory an actual friend and an excuse to teach readers about racism. I LOVE JESSI, but I don’t know how realistic this is. I’m white, and I feel very guilty about writing this, but I have a lot of questions. Wouldn’t they teach the middle schoolers at SMS about racism, because that would of averted the crisis. And how many black people live in Stoneybrook? This is just a thought. Don’t take my thoughts seriously.

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  11. Also, wouldn’t the PARENTS or TEACHERS get involved? They exist in this universe, maybe they can be useful for once. I get that they are supposed to be mature. But why can’t they tell on them? That is the mature thing to do. And they live in New England, which is one of the states where abolitionists lived, so that just makes it more confusing. And wouldn’t either the BSC or Mallory stick up for her? Or anyone? Are they trying to say Stineynrook is all racist idiots? Because racism only happens at extreme cases in this book, so they are changing their characters for the sake of a plot. Which I hate. And in the later books, there are a lot of Non white characters, but they aren’t made fun of. And don’t say they stopped being racist, because ITS ALL EIGHTH GRADE. Time barely passes, so there is no character development. And don’t say “BSC logic” because that is illogical. They should of had ONE GROUP of people make fun of Jessi, and have them get in trouble, and no one else is making fun of her. That is WAY more realistic. They should of said Jessi is an outcast because they are afraid to stand up to her, or think that they are joking, or think it is shock humor, or other reasons. The way they handled this is not the best. I like when they handle racism in kids books, but the way they did it had no sense. Why don’t the adults get involved? This is just a rant.

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  12. Having grown up in the 80s in a mostly white city/state, we had only several black students in the entire school. I don’t remember the other students teasing or bullying. But I do remember some of the teachers doing things like mispronounce names (like Jamal——seriously?) I remember in middle school Jamal was one of the most popular kids and had won a peer voted “best all around person” award at the end of the year assembly. The teacher/presenter kept butchering his name over and over and he had 250 students repeatedly saying “Jamal——Jamal” I remember thinking to myself “how can he not understand us, how’s he STILL mispronouncing it over and over?” Later on as I grew up I wondered if it was passive aggressive racism

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