Saturday, September 26, 2009

#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.

12 comments:

  1. I've just read that book, the chicken pox one, but I don't know that I blogged it! I'll take a look.

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  2. I got it! It's Kristy and the Snobs.

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  3. THANK YOU! If I had a prize, you'd be getting one right about now. :)

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  4. I also thought it was stupid how the Spier house is too small for Dawn, MA, Richard, and Sharon to all live in. But the Hobarts and their FOUR KIDS move in afterward! WTF?!

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  5. I never thought of that, Sadako! You're right....

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  6. hey Emily its Vanessa and Nicky!

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  7. I love reading about the Pike Plague. All that sickness must have been hard for the club to handle!

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    1. I totally agree. What's your favorite injury or sickness? I really like when Vanessa sprains her ankle.

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  8. This book contained two glaring continuity errors. 1) Dawn is saving up to get Mary Anne a cat pin as a 'now-we're-sisters' gift, but she already gave her a silver barette in the previous book. 2) Jeff tells Dawn about Carol for the first time, but he already told everyone about her in the last book.

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  9. Claudia found Nicky and Vanessa in the rec room.

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  10. A lot of inconsistencies in this book. It mentioned that pretty much all of her grandparents died. Didn't her Grandparents take Mary Anne in as a baby? Then fight for custody later? And there's this line:
    "It was my mother’s wedding day. Well, it was her second wedding day. Her first one had been sixteen years ago, when she married my father. About fourteen years later they had gotten divorced."
    So (if people aged normally, and not spend a zillion years in the 8th grade) this would make sense. Divorce after fourteen years, move (the series made it sound as though they moved pretty quickly after the divorce,) then date for a couple of years, then marry. Yet, Stonybrooke has this amazing time warp that keeps the children young.
    Ahhhh if only!

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  11. I personally found Mary Anne to be uncommonly rude in this book. She implies Dawn is fat, then rubs it in Dawn’s face that she’s going to the dance and Dawn isn’t.

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