#31 Dawn's Wicked Stepsister

The cover tagline

Would be a haiku with one

Less syllable. Darn!

Summary

Mary Anne has just caught Sharon's bouquet, and Dawn is none too happy about it. In fact, she says she'd have willingly killed for it. Nice, Dawn. She manages to control her homicidal tendencies long enough to celebrate with the rest of the BSC at the Spier house (after the wedding dinner at Chez Maurice) and to keep Mary Anne company overnight without shedding any blood. The new Mr. and Mrs. Spier return the next day from their night at the Strathmoore Inn (which, I might add, is where Kristy's dad stayed in the BSC movie...yay for continuity!). It's moving day, and Mary Anne becomes a basket case. She cries as she watches the movers take things out of her soon-to-be-ex house, and then gets grumpy about the stuff they had to get rid of. Things get pretty tense between Mary Anne and Dawn, and they even end up fighting over BSC jobs. Dawn in particular wants as much work as she can because she wants to give Mary Anne a "now we're sisters" present to match the one that Mary Anne gave her on the day of the wedding. Ding ding ding! I do believe we have a winner for the most glaring inconsistency in the entire series. In the previous book, Dawn gave Mary Anne a silver barette, and Mary Anne gave Dawn nothing. I might excuse it if a ghostwriter was responsible for one of the books, but Ann wrote both.

Back to the book. Adjusting to living together is proving to be difficult for the Schafers and Spiers. Both families have different ideas about food, cleaning, organization, and how to spend their free time. Mary Anne and Dawn are also trying to share a room, but it's not working out so well. There just isn't enough room for two people's stuff, which makes it look really cluttered and messy. Things kind of come to a head for Dawn when she and Mary Anne fight over whether or not to have music on when they study (Dawn wants it, MA doesn't). Dawn decides that she doesn't want to share a room with Mary Anne anymore, and comes up with a plan to scare her out. She makes Mary Anne think the secret passage is haunted and that the ghost of Jared Mullray is after her, and Mary Anne completely falls for it. She decides to move into the guest room, and both girls are relieved to have their own spaces (even though they don't say so). Also, the whole family is trying harder to get along, rather than agreeing to things that they don't want or agree with just to make the others happy. Sharon the Cat Hater even learns to like Tigger. :)

Not much of a subplot; the Pikes are all either sick or hurt. We've got colds, chicken pox (only Mallory), broken bones, pneumonia, a sprained ankle and a burnt hand.

Thoughts and Things

• Shouldn't the Schafers and Spiers have sat down before the wedding and discussed some ways to compromise when it came to food, etc?
• I definitely think the Arnold twins subplot from the last book should have been included in this one instead. The Pike stuff felt random.
• Speaking of the Pike subplot, there's another one at some point in the series that involved the majority of the kids getting the chicken pox and being laid up at the same time. I can remember that Nicky and Vanessa were the last ones to get it (or was it Nicky and Margo? Vanessa and Margo?), and one of the sitters found whichever two it was down in the rec room, counting their spots. It's driving me crazy that I can't remember which book it was. If anyone out there knows, leave me a comment, please!
• Mary Anne wasn't really that wicked. She was just kind of annoying, and I think that most of it was her acting out in reaction to all the changes in her life. It's kind of understandable.
• They keep referring to chicken pox as "the pox." Hee hee hee. That makes it sound like the plague or something.
• I actually read through each and every book before I recap it, no matter how many times I've read it in the past. That includes the famous Chapter Two descriptions. Normally, that's not such a big deal, but it was kind of tedious with these last two books. They were awfully similar...
• Dawn actually mentions Will Yamakawa at one point. I didn't think we heard anything about him after SS #3, until the book where Claudia lists every guy she's ever "fallen in love with" on vacation.