#34 Mary Anne and Too Many Boys

Why are Toby's shorts

Pulled up so high? He's not Steve

Urkel, for Pete's sake!

Summary

It's summer, and Mary Anne and Stacey are headed back to Sea City with the Pikes. Not long after arriving, they run into Toby and Alex, the boys they met last time they were there. Stacey and Toby bascially pick up where they left off, while Stacey desperately tries to hide the bottle of Sun-Lite she's using to lighten her hair. I had friends who used a similar product back in the day, and let's just say the results were never particularly cute. Anyway, Mary Anne is pretty happy to see Alex, too, which kind of complicates things. After all, she's got Logan waiting for her back home. Even so, Mary Anne agrees to go out with Alex later that week. The problem? Stacey has a date with Toby the same night, and the girls are supposed to take their nights off separately. In true Stacey-in-Sea-City fashion, Stacey orders Mary Anne to cancel her date. Which she does. She even tries the same thing again the next night, but Mary Anne actually stands up for herself and gets to go out with Alex. It's kind of awkward at first, but they warm up to each other and end up having a nice dinner. They go to the boarwalk, too, where Alex wins her a purple hippo in a ring toss game. The date only leaves Mary Anne more confused than ever; does she want Alex or Logan?

In other news, Vanessa Pike is dealing with a boy situation of her own. She's got a crush on Chris, the boy who works at the Ice Cream Palace, and she's even left him some secret admirer poems. Unfortunately, Chris thinks they're from Mallory. He even sends a message to Mal via Vanessa, asking her out. Luckily, the Pikes will be leaving Sea City before the time Chris wants to take her out. Vanessa ends up deciding not to tell Chris (or Mallory) the truth about what happened, and leaves Chris one last note telling him that his secret admirer won't be able to go out with him. Poor kid; that must have been rough.

Right before the end of the vacation, Toby ends up dumping Stacey. He wants to date other girls back home, and doesn't want to be tied down to his little vacation fling. Mary Anne and Alex have one last date before she goes home, at the same restaurant the went to before. This dinner is even more awkward than the first one, until the very end. At that point, both Mary Anne and Alex admit that they have significant others back home, and that they're better off as friends.

Rating: 4

Thoughts and Things

• Okay, so Mary Anne essentially cheats on Logan. Yes, she decided in the end that Alex was only a friend, but for most of the vacation, she wasn't sure. She spent a ton of time with Alex in order to find out. As far as I can remember, Logan never finds out about this. I guess he had good reason to be jealous of Alex in SS #10...

• Stacey throws a fit about towels in his book and in another one of the Sea City books. Was that intentional on the part of the ghostwriters?

• When I was a kid, I thought that Mary Anne's purple hippo sounded awesome. Now, not so much. Most of those carnival toys are really ugly and cheap-looking, and that's kind of how I picture that hippo.

• Vanessa really handled her situation well, and I love the way she and Mary Anne bonded over it. I wish we'd seen more of their friendship develop later in the series.

• This is definitely my favorite of the three Sea City books. :) It's also the fastest selling BSC book of all time, according to the facts in the back of Graduation Day.

• There's so much good eating in this book: Claudia's candy, the ice cream, pizza, and hot dogs in Sea City, the burgers, fries, and giant chocolate chip cookie that Kristy and the Rodowskys eat during their day at the pool....I always end up hungry after reading this book!

#33 Claudia and the Great Search

Why are Claud's left hand

And right foot so deformed on

The cover? So strange!

(*This book brings me into my own personal BSC "Promised Land." :) #33 through #47, plus some Super Specials, Mysteries, and a few of the later books (I'm looking at you, Mary Anne's Makeover and Dawn's Big Date!) are among the first books I owned, and were the ones that were being published when I was at the height of my BSC reading and collecting. I'm pretty excited to have gotten to this point in my recapping!*)

Summary

Janine has just recieved another award, and is getting a ton of attention for it. Claud is feeling overlooked and left out, and after suffering through a celebratory dinner for her sister, she escapes into the den to be alone for awhile. She picks up one of the family's photo albums, and notices how many baby pictures there are of Janine. Claudia isn't thrilled, seeing as she wanted to get away from all things Janine for awhile, but she figures that there are probably just as many pictures of her in another album. There aren't. Most Claudia pictures include Janine, too. She even goes through her parents' desk for pictures that might not have been put into albums, but all she finds is a locked box, and no key to open it with. Claudia then puts two and two together: she guesses that the lack of pictures (and the fact that she's so different from her family) means she was adopted, and that the locked box contains her adoption papers.

Claudia doesn't tell anyone her secret for about a week. She finally confides in Stacey, who's (understandably) pretty skeptical. Claud convinces her that it's true, and Stacey encourages her to look for her birth parents. She starts by calling the adoption agency that placed Emily Michelle, but that's a dead end. The organization has only been in operation for five years, and they only place Vietnamese children. Claudia then decides to take a look at her birth certificate, which is in a safe deposit box at the bank. That's a dead end, too; she doesn't have a key. Her next stop is good old Dr. Dellenkamp's office (does Stoneybrook even have another pediatrician? Lord knows they have enough lawyers. You think they'd have more than one kid doctor, too). Claudia cooks up some story about needing to see her birth records for a school project, but the receptionist tells her that she and her sister weren't seeing Dr. Dellenkamp back then (oh, I guess Stoneybrook does have another pediatrician). Dead end #3.

About a week later, Claudia heads to the library to look up birth announcements. She times the visit to coincide with her mother's library staff meeting; heaven forbid a BSC parent actually know what their children are up to. She looks at all the birth announcements for the week she was born, plus the month before and the month after. Claud finds nothing under her own name, so she decides that it was probably changed when the Kishis adopted her. She copies down the names of three girls who were born during the same week she thinks she was, and decides to track them down. Claud confirms that all but one of them actually do exist, and becomes convinced that she's that actually Resa Ho from Cuchara, Wyoming. She calls Stacey with the news, and Stacey is again skeptical. She convinces Claudia to talk to her parents, and after dinner that night, Claudia actually does it. The Kishis tell her that she's definitely not adopted, and they help her to see that she's really not so different from everyone else in her family. She and Peaches are a lot alike, and Claud looks so much like Mimi when Mimi was young that she says they could have been twins. As for the lack of a birth announcement, the Kishis didn't put one in the Stoneybrook News. It appeared in another paper that went out of business. The mysterious locked box? It's full of cash, in case of emergency.

Subplot: Emily Michelle is having some problems. She's extremely delayed compared to other two year olds, and even got turned away from a preschool program because of it. When Claudia is sitting for her one day, she comes up with some simple games to teach Emily her colors, shapes, and matching. Kristy's mom ends up asking Claud to work with Emily several days a week, and those lessons help Emily progress enough that she'll be ready for preschool in the fall. Too bad that she'll never actually get there because of the BSC time warp. :)

Rating: 3.5

Thoughts and Things

• If the Kishis keep things like birth certificates in their safe deposit box, why would Claudia think that her adoption papers are kept at home? Wouldn't they be in the safe deposit box, too?

• I enjoy the Kishi parents! They're painted as being kind of strict, but when push comes to shove, they're very loving and supportive. Even though we always hear how they don't value Claudia's creativity as much as Janine's academic success, they tell Claudia multiple times throughout the series how proud they are of her art.

• When I first read this book, I thought that it would end with Claudia finding out that she really was adopted, and that Emily Michelle was her sister.

• Stacey hasn't been feeling well for the last few books. That's some serious foreshadowing for #43, and it's still 10 books away!

• One of the stories Claudia concocts when she's calling the families that had baby girls the week she was born is that she's studying their last name, and wants to make a family tree. She asks for names and birthdates of their children, and I can't believe people actually gave her that information. I'd be pretty suspicious if someone called me up asking questions like that!

• In this book, Mr. Kishi and Claudia have to drive all the way across town from SMS to get to Janine's award ceremony at the high school. When Dawn in stalking Travis in Dawn and the Older Boy, though, the schools are right next to each other.

• The Perkins girls make chocolate chip cookies from scratch without a recipe. I still need a recipe to make chocolate chip cookies and I've made them lots of times. Should I feel bad that a 5 year old and 2.5 year old have me beat? ;)

#32 Kristy and the Secret of Susan

I can't really write

A snarky haiku about

The autism book.

(*I decided to start doing something new with this entry. I'll be giving each book a rating from 0, meaning crappy, to 5, meaning awesome. It's strictly based on how much I liked the book, not on its literary merit. Look for that after the summary!*)

Summary

The Felders call the BSC looking for a regular sitter for their daughter, Susan, and Kristy gets the job. The club has never sat for Susan before, in spite of the fact that the Felders live just around the corner from Claudia. Susan is autistic, and has been away at a special school for years. She's back home for a month, until her new school starts, and Mrs. Felder needs someone to look after Susan for three afternoons a week, so she can have a break.

Kristy is a little apprehensive when she goes to the Felders for the first time. It's just an introductory afternoon, to make sure that Kristy really wants to deal with everything that goes into taking care of someone like Susan. Kristy is fascinated when Mrs. Felder introduces her to Susan. On one hand, Susan doesn't talk or communicate with people, and in a lot of ways, she acts like a much younger child (she's 8). On the other hand, Susan can play anything on the piano after hearing it only once, and can sing along as well. She's also got a perpetual calendar in her head; give her any date, and she'll give the day of the week that it fell on. Kristy leaves the Felders more excited than ever to take the job. She also leaves determined to "fix" Susan enough so that she won't have to be sent away to school.

Meanwhile, the Hobart family has just moved into Mary Anne's old house. The four boys are having a little trouble adjusting to life in the states; other kids keep teasing them about their accents, and the Aussie slang they use. Kristy decides to introduce Susan to the boys, since she thinks Susan also needs help adjusting to Stoneybrook. No miracles happen or anything, but the Hobart boys do a pretty good job of accepting Susan and her limitations. The other kids in the nieghborhood (the same ones who've been teasing the Hobarts) have a field day when they first meet Susan. Kristy kind of puts them in their place when she shows them Susan's calendar trick. In fact, kids keep showing up at the Felder's house the next couple of times that Kristy's there sitting. All they really want is to see her either play the piano or do her memory trick, but Kristy is thrilled that Susan is suddenly so popular. Then, one of the kids lets something slip: Mel Tucker, one of the teasers and also the psycho that sends scary notes to Dawn in the second mystery, has been charging kids a dollar to see Susan. Kristy puts a stop to that, and takes Susan over to the Hobarts, where Claudia is sitting. They talk about what happened, and watch James bond with one of his former teasers, Zach. It's then that Kristy realizes that Susan probably doesn't fit in with regular kids, and that maybe going away to school is the best thing for her. Kristy feels like she failed in her mission to integrate Susan, but she knows that school is probably the best place for Susan to be. Also...the Felders are expecting another baby, and Kristy is excited to sit for her someday. Too bad we never hear about the Felders again, other than a brief reappearance by Susan later in the series.

Rating: 3.5

Thoughts and Things

• I have to hand it to Ann for writing this book. Autism wasn't talked about quite as publicly in 1990 as it is now (heck, I learned what autism was from reading this book!), and she did a pretty good job of putting the issue out there.

• More kudos to Ann for not making Mrs. Felder look like a horrible person for hiring a sitter because she wants a break from her child. I think a lot of parents just want a break sometimes, whether or not their children have special needs, but many probably feel like they can't admit it.

• This one actually depressed me a little in some places, especially when Kristy or whoever would talk about how Susan will never be much of anything, and how all her parents' hopes for her were dashed. At least it ended on a rather positive note, with Mr. Felder's optimism about Susan's new school, and the new baby.

• Mallory and Ben, sitting in a tree.... ;)

• Go look up the lyrics to "Sheik of Araby," one of the songs Susan sings in the book. They're not exactly child-appropriate....

• For anyone who's familiar with early 1990's Australian slang: what exactly is a rev head???

#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.

#30 Mary Anne and the Great Romance

Mary Anne looks kind

Of FLDS on the

Cover. It's the hair!

Summary

Richard, Dawn, and Mary Anne surprise Sharon with a birthday dinner at Chez Maurice. When cake time comes, though, Dawn and Mary Anne are the ones who are in for a surprise. Richard proposes to Sharon, and she accepts! Dawn and Mary Anne are pretty excited that they get to be stepsisters, but not so excited that their parents want only a civil ceremony with a justice of the peace. Seriously...the girls practically had an entire fancy church wedding planned out before Richard and Sharon could even let them know what their plans were! Richard and Sharon end up compromising, and agree to a small chapel wedding with only Sharon's parents, a few work friends, and (of course) the BSC as guests, followed by a dinner at Chez Maurice.

All is well, until Dawn tells Mary Anne that she thinks they should share Dawn's room when the Spiers move in with the Schafers. The problem? Mary Anne didn't know she'd be moving, and she doesn't want to. She eventually calms down, though, once she finds out that Tigger won't be kicked to the curb, and that the Spiers won't have to get rid of all their stuff.

The wedding goes smoothly, other than the fact that the Pike triplets think a mostly naked angel in the chapel's stained glass window is the funniest thing they've ever seen. Dawn gives Mary Anne a silver barette as a "now we're sisters" present; remember this, because that bit of information will come in handy during my next recap. Anyone who's been reading the BSC much as an adult will know what I'm talking about. Anyway, it's time for Sharon to throw the bouquet, and....the book ends with a cliffhanger, so we don't know who catches it. (Spoiler: it's Mary Anne.)

Meanwhile, the Arnold twins are having issues. Carolyn is now Ms. Popular at school, and Marilyn feels left out. They're fighting and arguing all the time, until Mary Anne plants the idea of separate rooms in their heads. Mrs. Arnold agrees, and the girls are much better friends when they're not sharing a bedroom.

Thoughts and Things

• Why is it that Mrs. Arnold can't seem to see what needs to be done for her daughters unless a member of the BSC points it out to her? First Mallory, now Mary Anne.
• I think this subplot would have made more sense as a part of the next book, when Mary Anne and Dawn are dealing with their own room issues. Better yet, this book and the next one should have been combined into one book somehow. Maybe they originally were one book, but it ended up too long and Ann had to split it up.
• I can't believe that Richard and Sharon agreed to a wedding that wasn't what they originally wanted, and that they didn't seem that excited about, just to please their teenage daughters. It's nice of them to want to include Mary Anne and Dawn in their decisions, but still. It's their wedding. Also, I'm assuming that the newly married Spiers footed the bill for the dinner at Chez Maurice. They must have loved paying for dinner at the nicest restaurant in town for the entire BSC, plus the Pike triplets.
• No one ever mentions what Jeff thought of the news that his mother was getting remarried. He just shows up before the wedding and acts really formal around Richard. I would have liked to see Jeff's reaction.

SS #3 Baby-sitters' Winter Vacation

The BSC sits

During their vacation. Try

Having fun instead!

Summary

Apparently, SMS takes a week long trip to a Vermont ski lodge every year...yet this is the first and last time we actually see them go. During their time at the lodge, the school holds their annual Winter Carnival. It includes events like snow sculpture and a snowball fight, but the highlights are always the sports competitions. This year, things get a little interesting when a busload of elementary school kids are in an accident on the way to the lodge, and left without any supervision while their teachers are in the hospital. Enter the BSC. Let's see what else they get up to during the week:

Mary Anne has volunteered to be the trip historian. That means she's in charge of researching the lodge and town, and writing a paper about them when she gets back home. She manages to uncover a possible lodge ghost story during her studies, but the consensus seems to be that people have active imaginations when it comes to stuff like that. When she's not working on her project and avoiding the sports competitions like the plague, she's busy mooning over Logan. He's not at the lodge because his family is in Aruba, and Mary Anne is convinced that he's going to fall in love with some hot island girl. She writes a whole bunch of sappy letters that rival, if not surpass, the one from SS #2 in terms of embarrassment factor. At least Mary Anne realizes that they're stupid and doesn't send them. She does, however, continue to worry until she gets a phone call from Logan. He will apparently die if SMS is snowed in at the lodge and he can't see Mary Anne when he comes back from Aruba, which makes her feel a whole heck of a lot more secure in their relationship.

Stacey falls in LUV on the ski slopes with Pierre, from upstate Vermont. She's hot for the fact the his voice is changing, and lets us know that meeting Pierre basically negates every single other crush she's ever had. Stacey then kind of disappears until the end of the trip, when she and Pierre say a romantic good-bye at the dance that the lodge throws for all the students who are staying there.

Dawn has a pretty tough time of it during this trip. She klutzes out during the ice skating competition, incurring the wrath of her team. She then joins a practice snowball fight, but leaves when Alan Grey stuffs a snowball down her back and laughs at her. To clear her head, Dawn plans to take a few runs on the ski slopes. She only gets as a far as the lift; when she falls getting on, she gives up and goes back to the lodge. She tries to talk things out with Mary Anne, but Mary Anne is too wrapped up in herself and her Logan issues to care. They fight, but it doesn't last long.

Kristy is the captain of her Winter War team, and the organizer of all the competitions and contests. She spends most of the book being really, really competitive, especially where Claudia is concerned. They're both apparently expert skiers, with Claudia having a slight edge over Kristy. Kristy doesn't seem to like that much, so she's determined to beat Claudia (and her team). No luck there, though; after Kristy pushes a bunch of kids who don't ski into the cross-country skiing competition and one of them breaks his ankle, her team ends up losing the war. Kristy is also the one who volunteers the BSC to rescue the elementary school kids after their bus accident, and she's also the one who offers their supervisory services during the week, while the kids' injured teachers are recovering. To her credit, she makes that second offer after Claudia suggests it. So, she's not totally responsible for the sitters working on their vacation.

Claudia basically just skis a lot. She develops a massive crush on her French ski instructor, and actually starts to think he might be interested in her. The trouble with that? He's at least 25, married, and the father of two. She eventually realizes that it would never have worked out between them (duh), and that's she's still got Will Yamakawa from Camp Mohawk waiting for her.

Jessi is in charge of the SMS talent show. It's the first time the role has ever been given to a 6th grader, and she's eager to prove herself to the other kids at school. She still feels that some don't accept her because of her race, and she wants to show them that she's more than that. She ends up performing something from Swan Lake during the show, and when it goes over well with the audience, Jessi finally feels like she's made a name for herself at SMS. She also has her very first "OMG racism!!!) moment in this book: one of the elementary school kids, Pinky, is awful. She's rude and nasty and bossy, and Jessi is sure it's because she's black. What Mallory tries to point out, and what Jessi doesn't see until the trip is almost over, is that Pinky is nasty to everyone. Pinky is homesick, and is trying to cover it up with attitude. No racism there.

Mallory goes all Harriet the Spy again, and it works out about as well as it did when she spied during the Bahamas trip. Mal says she's determined to make observations that are totally true, and not read anything into what she sees that's not really there. So, of course, she spends the whole week reading things into her observations that aren't really there. Mal decides that Ms. Halliday (gym teacher extraordinaire and one of the chaperones) is secretly in love with the vice principal after she sees her crying in the bathroom, and that the cook is trying to kill everyone after she sees him sprinkle something into a vat of soup. She also spies on Stacey and Pierre because she really wants to know what goes on when a boy and girl kiss. Has she never seen a movie? Do her parents never kiss in front of her? Do kids at school never kiss in the hallways? Anyway, Stacey and Pierre actually catch her watching them. If it were me, I'd be creeped out. Mal is also scared about the dance at the end of their week at the lodge, but it all goes okay in the end.

Thoughts and Things

• Okay, let's play a game of who's who on the cover: Mal and Jessi are obvious, and the girl standing behind them is (I think) Kristy. Claudia is also obvious, Mary Anne is in the yellow coat and grey hat, Dawn in in the green coat and red beret, and Stacey is in the brown coat and blue beret. It took me forever to decide who was Kristy and who was Mary Anne, and I'm still not sure about my choice. I'm a little more confident about Dawn/Stacey, but they're kind of interchangeable, too.
• Jessi really only had a couple of days to pull together the talent show. It might have been smarter to hold auditions before the trip; waiting until they were already at the lodge meant that some people who weren't chosen hauled all their props and costumes up there for nothing.
• I can't believe that the Brunos let Logan call Mary Anne from Aruba. That must have been freakishly expensive. I also found it a little freaky that he said he'd die if she got snowed in and he couldn't see her when he got back. If it were me, that would be grounds for ending the relationship.
• Why did Guy (Claudia's ski instructor) have to be French? That's so cliche. I'm sure there are hot ski instructors from other countries, too. :)
• Speaking of Guy, I always think of that ski lodge episode of Frasier when I read this book. It's one of the best in the series, and it too involves a French ski intructor named Guy.
• Pierre writes Stacey an "I love you" postcard after they get home, but the only time we hear about him for the rest of the series is when Mary Anne observes how easily Stacey forgets about him when she sees Toby again in Sea City. I guess that's actually pretty realistic, though. How often do 13-year-old vacation romances really last for more than a couple of postcards/letters/phone calls/emails?
• Mary Anne was ridiculous for blaming her fight with Dawn on Dawn. The poor girl had a rotten day and needed a listening ear, but Mary Anne couldn't put her own issues aside long enough to be of any help. You think she would have learned not to be so self-centered after everything that happened with Logan in #25, but I guess not.
• This book gets a lot of hate when Super Specials are discussed, but I like it. The lodge sounds awesome, and we don't see too many wintery vacations in the BSC. It's just this one, SS #7, and one of the Super Mysteries, I think.

#29 Mallory and the Mystery Diary

Why does Mal want to

Be thirteen so badly? That's

The REAL mystery...

Summary

Stacey and her mom are busy settling into their new home. Mallory and Claudia are helping them one day when the girls find an old trunk in the McGills' attic. Mrs. McGill lets Mal take it home, but she can't find out what's inside; it's locked, and there's no sign of a key. At first, she won't wreck it by breaking the locks, but her curiosity finally gets the better of her, and she recruits the triplets to do the dirty work. Inside, she finds a bunch of old clothes and (at the very bottom of the trunk) a diary. It was written in 1890, by a 12 year old girl named Sophie. Sophie's family lived in Stacey's house back then, and the diary is for the most part filled with the trials and tribulations of being 12. When Mal reads further, though, things get interesting. Sophie's mother gives birth to a baby boy and dies soon afterward. Not long after her burial, a portrait of Sophie's mother disappears from Sophie's grandfather's house across town. Mr. Hickman (the grandfather, and also the resident of "Old Hickory's" grave in the Stoneybrook cemetary...see #17)) blames the disappearance on Sophie's father, Jared, whose reputation is pretty much ruined after that. Sophie vows to clear her father's name, and writes in the very last entry in her journal that her spirit, along with her father's, will stay in their house until the mystery is solved. Have Stacey and her mother moved into a haunted house?

Meanwhile, Mallory is tutoring Buddy Barrett with his reading. He's having some trouble in school, and Mal comes up with some fun ways to get him interested in reading again. They read comics, and then make their own. They also read some Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. Buddy enjoys those so much that Mal ends up telling him about the diary mystery that she and the rest of the BSC are working on. Buddy is interested, so Mal takes him over to her house to look over the diary and the trunk. Buddy finds a pocket in the trunk that no one had noticed before, which contains a confession from James Hickman. Sophie's father hadn't stolen the painting; no one had. Mr. Hickman was so distraught over his daughter's death that he hired someone to paint over her portrait, which was rehung in a different room in his mansion. He didn't want to admit what he'd done, so he lied and told people it had been stolen. Everyone else suspected Mr. Hickman's son-in-law, and the old guy just let them think that.

The confession is all well and good, but the painting is still missing. Since Old Hickory owned both the large house he lived in and what's now Stacey's house, Mal and Buddy theorize that some of what's still up in the McGill's attic might be stuff that Old Hickory's nephew moved up there when he inherited his uncle's estate. As it turns out, they were right. The painting is there, and once Stacey's mother gets it properly restored (an ugly picture of ships had been painted over it), they hang it over their fireplace.

Thoughts and Things

• The book opens with this famous Mallory line: "If only I were thirteen instead of eleven, life would be a picnic." Seriously? I don't know about you guys, but being 11 rocked for me, and 13 was awful. Don't be in such a hurry, Mal!
• I wish we'd heard more about what the clothes in the trunk looked like. Finding those would have been just as interesting to me as finding the diary, if I'd been in that situation.
• An 11 year old tutor for a kid who's having serious trouble with reading in school? I know Mal is smart, and she did come up with some creative ways to help Buddy, but really.
• This book makes me think of Afton, a very active member of the online BSC fandom who passed away not too long ago. I think I remember reading somewhere that this was the first BSC book she read,and the one that got her hooked on the series. Miss you, Afton!