STACEY'S DIFFERENT... AND IT'S HARDER ON HER THAN ANYONE KNOWS
Welcome to the discussion post for week three! Don't panic if you haven't finished The Truth About Stacey yet - we're all in different time zones, so things will be a little bit staggered. The post doesn't have an expiry date on it, so just comment whenever you're ready.
This is the post to discuss your reading of The Truth About Stacey.
What was your favourite part? What was your least favourite part? Any memorable quotes you'd like to share? What had you forgotten about since the last time this book was read? If someone wrote a fic set during the timeline of this fic, what should they write?
There are no mandatory questions or points of discussion for this - anything you want to talk about in relation to this week's book, go ahead!
Next week's book is BSC #4 - Mary Anne Saves the Day.
I won't be around again for a few hours (and I still have to read this one, eek!) but I'm going to hijack the post momentarily to promote the FIC PROMPTS POST, in case you haven't seen it yet!
So many Mimi and Mary Anne feels! I am tearing up that Mimi is able to tell Mary Anne when she was born! Mary Anne was born in the fall, right? So Claudia and Kristy were already born! I'm having so many feelings imagining it, the Thomases and the Kishis with their babies watching the Spiers go off to the hospital!
I love how seriously Mimi and Janine already take the BSC, though. They are awesome.
I love MA's idea to call the agency! Coupled with the burglar alarms from last week, she is really a quick thinker. I'm not surprised she gets to save the day next week. I love how that is almost foreshadowed with her slowly growing boldness and resourcefulness. Having friends is good for her!
I had forgotten that Stacey didn't tell her old friends about the diabetes either. Poor Stacey. All of this is just heartbreaking. And she is so desperate to hold on to the club and her new friends. :(
The visor makes its first appearance! AND KID KITS. I've always wondered how big they are intended to be, so their first citation is "carton" which isn't terribly clear.
I do think Kristy is interesting in her desperate willingness to hand over jobs to Sam, Charlie, and Janine. It also kind of foreshadows the club's need to expand later on.
Love that Stacey can talk to Dr. Johanssen about her problems!
Oh, Charlotte, you need Becca real bad. :(
This book has a lot of interesting Kristy and Stacey stuff, since a lot of it is based in Stacey's desperation to keep the club alive. They're a pairing I never thought much about, but it's interesting. I think I said that back in Kristy's Great Idea too. It's interesting how intimate things are with only four of them.
Here's Mal's first appearance! She goes back and forth between the sitters and the kids. That's kind of funny. And weird, since the other kids are like, six, tops and she's 10.
Mimi teaching Mary Anne to knit! And telling her about Alma! I love these two so much. I want all the Mimi and MA bonding.
Ugh, I remember Janet and Leslie. THEY MADE KRISTY CRY. I forgot Kristy cried. :(((
I forgot all about Stacey and Laine making up. I know things go bad with Laine later, and I guess that was all I remembered. Laine is just a huge bitch in my head but they are really sweet here. (And now that I think about it they had to be friends in the NYC Super Special because some of them stayed at her apartment.)
This isn't a book I remember liking too much as a kid, probably as evidenced by my vague memories of it. I was into these books for the baby-sitting, the wild plans, the big family antics. Stacey was one of the less interesting girls and I wasn't into the plots about the sitters dealing with their own problems. (I was only in first or second grade when I started reading the BSC so I think I was too young. I was a strong reader falling in that weird gap where age-appropriate books were too easy and books that were on my reading level were about teen/adult problems and went over my head.) So it'll be interesting to revisit these as an adult, because I liked this book a lot. Stacey's situation is really sad and I love how mature she is in laying everything out for her parents. It's still clear to me that her parents are a mess and I know they divorce soon, so I'm sure they have underlying issues that Stacey's diabetes has just exacerbated. Poor Stacey. That has to be tough for her to feel like she's caught in this. I'm fascinated by the McGills calling on actualfax QUACKS, though! They seemed more normal than that to me. And it's fricking diabetes, not some rare, deadly disorder. I know a lot has changed since the books were written but it is seriously bizarre.
(Whoops, that's what I get for typing so fast on my lunch break, combining Dr. Johannsen and Mrs. Newton into one person. Lemme just, uh, rewrite those sentences to be clearer....)
This was another one that hadn't stuck in my brain, but I agree with most of the comments here.
Mary Anne and Mimi spending time together, and Mimi telling her about her mom broke my heart.
I really enjoyed Dr. Johannsen's relationship with Stacey, as well as Mrs. Newton's relationship with the BSC. Not only does Dr. Johannsen help Stacey with her parents and steering clear of quack doctors, but Mrs. Newton also is a very good mom and neighbor, knowing that an infant needs older care but not shutting the BSC out entirely because Jamie loves them and needs stability.
(And I liked that of all the agency rivals, the one sitter who turned out reliable was the boy, a nice nod to the fact that boys can be baby-sitters too.)
Also I also forgot that Kristy cried. Kristy! :(
Another thing that I considered when reading this was that this book came out in 1986, during the first few years of the AIDS crisis-- with Stacey being forced to keep her illness a secret, I wonder if some people were wondering if that was it. Laine does stay away from her worried that whatever she has is infectious, after all. Possibly I'm overthinking it, but I just suspect that a kid having "a mystery illness" in the 1980s might cause a lot of problems (thanks for letting her tell her New York friends what was going on, Stacey's parents!).
— SMS is apparently the only middle school in Stoneybrook which I’m gonna just take as early instalment weirdness. Because Stoneybrook Day School, Stoneybrook Academy, and Kelsey. Or I guess it also could be informed by Stacey having a totally different frame of reference for what constitutes a tiny town. The way she talks about Stoneybrook, it's like she's moved to Dungatar (the town in The Dressmaker, which I'm reading rn and was the first tiny town I thought of). Stoneybrook is not Dungatar.
— Janine FREAKING OUT over the Baby-Sitters Agency, awww <3
— If Stoneybrook is as small as Stacey's narration makes me imagine, the Agency should flop immediately because parents would already know (or know of) Liz and Michelle. Or, at the very least, Kristy and MA would know who they are if they're in the grade immediately above. I guess this is just Stacey's NYC frame of reference at work again? Stoneybrook sounds like a decent-sized town to me.
— I tried the milky-way-bars-in-the-freezer thing once. It sucked :( from memory, they were that horrible combination of way too hard, becoming way too chewy. Though I've since learned that what we call milky ways aren't the same thing what the USA calls milky ways, so maybe it works better with a USA milky way. Feel free to test this and report back! :D
— I love this:
"I have two more thoughts," Kristy went on. She was speaking hesitantly, and I noticed Claudia glance at her sharply.
CLAUDIA’S RADAR FOR KRISTY GOING TOO FAR HAS A LIFETIME OF FINE TUNING LMAO <3
— I said this somewhere up the page, but the point where I feel worst for Kristy in this book is when she's all “why didn’t WE think of balloons?” Something about the helplessness of it gets me even more than when she cries.
— Aww Charlie taking DM to watch cheerleader practice. And he learns the cheers and performs them at home! <3
— MA's really specific skill of nailing The Little Engine That Could made me grin really hard.
— Stacey buys a dinosaur pin for her beret <3 that strikes me as more of a Claudia move than a Stacey one, but that's cool. I love BSC fashion.
— “You’re liars! And… and dirty businesswomen!” is such a winner insult.
— Stacey's cheer has never ever managed to leave my brain. Rah rah rah! Sis boom bah! Something... something... the Baby-Sitters Club! Hooray!
-This book was one of my favorites! Sooo good for my underdog-loving id as a kid. The honest and hardworking baby-sitting club versus the corrupt sellout kids? The BSC becoming more fire-forged than ever? Bring it! Not to mention heaps and heaps of woobie Stacey.
-So, fun story: as ESL, I was always learning new English words from BSC books, and rereading, I suddenly remembered that for this one it was “competition”, which is what Claudia calls the Baby Sitters Agency. Will probably be finding these all over the rereads, lol.
-I love how Stacey says that Claudia is her best friend but she also doesn’t know what [she] would do without Kristy and Mary Anne, awww. The divides (at first) in the club are also interesting, character-wise: Kristy and Stacey are ferociously protective of the club for different reasons, and so they’re the ones who want to take immediate action against the agency while Claudia and Mary Anne want to wait it out.
-Mary Anne is not very close to her strict father. Hmmm, I feel like at this point, AMM was still feeling out how she should characterize Richard, since he had yet to make an on-page appearance. That said, Mary Anne is one of the first who suggests going to their parents for advice on what to do about the kids being mistreated.
-Haha, does anybody remember Mary Anne’s Atlanta Pig Farm call in Poor Mallory? This was the first thing I thought of when she had her brain wave in calling the agency.
-I don’t remember how dark Stacey’s thoughts got re: her diagnosis. Learning Maureen and Edward couldn’t have kids anymore then wondering what if she’d died and they’d been childless…those are really harsh things to think of, let alone to digest when you’re twelve. : (
- I really like the whole sense we get of families that grew up next door to each other helping each other out. Awwww at the Thomas(-Brewers) having Thanksgiving with the Spiers, and Elizabeth taking Jamie to the office.
-Uh, Charlie, you may not have a thing for Big Brother Parties but you damn well deserved one after Friends Forever #1.
-Mallory went back and forth between charges and babysitters – oh hey, foreshadowing.
-I always assumed Claudia was Jamie’s favorite, but here he cries about Kristy hmmm. I guess because she has the more dominant personality and her absence makes more of an impact. They’re all so great with Jamie here, from giving him a party to all of them giving him gifts.
-CHARLOTTE! :( Becca can’t come soon enough. Childhood bullying is really horrible. And Stacey-Charlotte almost sister feels! Stacey’s pretty great at handling sulky kids- I like how she was honest with Charlotte about money being a good bonus of baby-sitting but she also tells Charlotte how much she sincerely likes baby-sitting for her.
-Also, the way the BSC finally handled the agency was actually rather, ah, professional for 12-year-olds. I like their indecision at first because they didn’t want to ‘rat’ but also how they went to grown-ups for input, because they themselves are just kids after all. And how they all advised the charges to be the one telling their parents.
-So, this book sealed the deal for Stacey being the mature/sophisticated one early on, y/y? Stacey taking charge of what she wants from her treatment is really great, though I reckon a little psychiatry wouldn’t have hurt her after what she went through in NY (it was certainly good for Mary Anne later). And I love how she goes to Dr. Johannsen, how she says it’s MY body to her parents.
-finally, lmao @ Kristy taking the makeovers flyer from Liz and Michelle. Classic Kristy!
"It’s the biggest one around, with five levels of stores, a zillion restaurants and food stands, four movie theaters, a videogame arcade, a petting zoo, and an exhibits area."
Is this pretty big as malls go? I grew up in Minnesota so we had the Mall of America which was enormous but also very atypical, and I got the impression that most malls...weren't like that.
I sort of sympathized with Stacey more this time around than I remembered. I'm twice her age and I get nauseating migraines, and I only just learned/worked up the nerve to give myself shots for them every so often. Still, the idea of having to carry those around and be dependent on them is pretty nerve-wracking. Poor kid. :(
Okay I finally got this one done. I think everyone has already commented on the stuff I noticed, but here are my notes anyway!
- Fun fact: my book is obviously one I've bought secondhand. The previous owner was Marisa or Marise - I wonder if she misses her BSC books.
- Omg Stacey not making any friends for a month, until she met Claudia. :(
- One of the things I'm frequently infuriated by is how poor the canon map of Stoneybrook is. And here, Stacey says Fawcett Avenue is "two streets away" from Bradford Court. THE MAP IS SO WRONG.
- Awww Mimi remembering when Richard and Alma went to the hospital ♥
- Even if the sitters in the Baby-sitters Agency are as old as 15 or 16 (it only says "13 and up" on the flyer), that still seems super young to have an 11PM curfew on weeknights.
- Stacey's physical descriptions of the girls after Janine brings the flyer in are SUPER weird.
- I had somehow forgotten about the whole "Candy Kane" dating "Winston Churchill" thing haha. OTP, amirite?
- Stacey talking about her diabetes breaks my heart. You can tell how hard it is for her.
- Ugh these books are so inconsistent with switching out American stuff with what we say/use in Australia. Like "twinkie" is still there but then Maureen is all "you've lost a kilogram!" It's so jarring.
- THE VISOR ♥ Kristy suddenly being in Full President Mode.
- I want fic about the Johanssens being all brainy. Charlotte's mom is a doctor and her dad is an engineer!
- Omg Polly from Polly's Fine Candy. I kind of love the idea of this grumpy old lady who dislikes children running a candy store. I bet Polly is friends with Mrs Porter. OR omg what if Polly is Polly Porter and Morbidda Destiny is just the oldest, crankiest sister, but on Sundays Polly and her other sister go over there for tea and they talk irritably about children while they suck butterscotch candies together. BOOM. NEW HEAD CANON.
- The Spiers and the Thomases having Thanksgiving together! ♥
- Can someone please write a fic about Charlie and David Michael at cheerleader practice, both of them totally enjoying it for different reasons.
- Aww, Stacey cuddling Jamie in the laundry, and Louie leanng on them. Aww ♥ My feels.
- Uggghhh Stacey's parents are making me so mad. I know their hearts are in the right place, but NO, you guys.
- Oh, the scene with Stacey and Dr. Johanssen ♥
- Stacey and Pete are adorable.
- MARY ANNE AND MIMI FEELS ♥ I'm impressed Mary Anne learned how to make hats before she could make scarves.
- Lmao Kristy confronting Mrs Newton.
- Ugggh the Agency sending "false sitters" makes me SO ANGRY.
- Wow, NYC is a two hour drive? Why did I think it was closer? And Abby's mom commutes that every day in the later books! I thought MY commute was bad (1.5 hours in the car each way.) Ugh two hours, nooo.
- God, Ed and Maureen are fucking clueless. Thank god they come to their senses.
- Stacey and Laine making up is really sweet ♥ I love that they just start talking about dumb stuff and mutual people they know.
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stoneybrook2016-05-15 10:20 am
STACEY'S DIFFERENT... AND IT'S HARDER ON HER THAN ANYONE KNOWS
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(Anonymous) 2016-05-15 12:31 am (UTC)(link)So many Mimi and Mary Anne feels! I am tearing up that Mimi is able to tell Mary Anne when she was born! Mary Anne was born in the fall, right? So Claudia and Kristy were already born! I'm having so many feelings imagining it, the Thomases and the Kishis with their babies watching the Spiers go off to the hospital!
I love how seriously Mimi and Janine already take the BSC, though. They are awesome.
I love MA's idea to call the agency! Coupled with the burglar alarms from last week, she is really a quick thinker. I'm not surprised she gets to save the day next week. I love how that is almost foreshadowed with her slowly growing boldness and resourcefulness. Having friends is good for her!
I had forgotten that Stacey didn't tell her old friends about the diabetes either. Poor Stacey. All of this is just heartbreaking. And she is so desperate to hold on to the club and her new friends. :(
The visor makes its first appearance! AND KID KITS. I've always wondered how big they are intended to be, so their first citation is "carton" which isn't terribly clear.
I do think Kristy is interesting in her desperate willingness to hand over jobs to Sam, Charlie, and Janine. It also kind of foreshadows the club's need to expand later on.
Love that Stacey can talk to Dr. Johanssen about her problems!
Oh, Charlotte, you need Becca real bad. :(
This book has a lot of interesting Kristy and Stacey stuff, since a lot of it is based in Stacey's desperation to keep the club alive. They're a pairing I never thought much about, but it's interesting. I think I said that back in Kristy's Great Idea too. It's interesting how intimate things are with only four of them.
Here's Mal's first appearance! She goes back and forth between the sitters and the kids. That's kind of funny. And weird, since the other kids are like, six, tops and she's 10.
Mimi teaching Mary Anne to knit! And telling her about Alma! I love these two so much. I want all the Mimi and MA bonding.
Ugh, I remember Janet and Leslie. THEY MADE KRISTY CRY. I forgot Kristy cried. :(((
I forgot all about Stacey and Laine making up. I know things go bad with Laine later, and I guess that was all I remembered. Laine is just a huge bitch in my head but they are really sweet here. (And now that I think about it they had to be friends in the NYC Super Special because some of them stayed at her apartment.)
This isn't a book I remember liking too much as a kid, probably as evidenced by my vague memories of it. I was into these books for the baby-sitting, the wild plans, the big family antics. Stacey was one of the less interesting girls and I wasn't into the plots about the sitters dealing with their own problems. (I was only in first or second grade when I started reading the BSC so I think I was too young. I was a strong reader falling in that weird gap where age-appropriate books were too easy and books that were on my reading level were about teen/adult problems and went over my head.) So it'll be interesting to revisit these as an adult, because I liked this book a lot. Stacey's situation is really sad and I love how mature she is in laying everything out for her parents. It's still clear to me that her parents are a mess and I know they divorce soon, so I'm sure they have underlying issues that Stacey's diabetes has just exacerbated. Poor Stacey. That has to be tough for her to feel like she's caught in this. I'm fascinated by the McGills calling on actualfax QUACKS, though! They seemed more normal than that to me. And it's fricking diabetes, not some rare, deadly disorder. I know a lot has changed since the books were written but it is seriously bizarre.
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(Anonymous) - 2016-05-15 01:30 (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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This was another one that hadn't stuck in my brain, but I agree with most of the comments here.
Mary Anne and Mimi spending time together, and Mimi telling her about her mom broke my heart.
I really enjoyed Dr. Johannsen's relationship with Stacey, as well as Mrs. Newton's relationship with the BSC. Not only does Dr. Johannsen help Stacey with her parents and steering clear of quack doctors, but Mrs. Newton also is a very good mom and neighbor, knowing that an infant needs older care but not shutting the BSC out entirely because Jamie loves them and needs stability.
(And I liked that of all the agency rivals, the one sitter who turned out reliable was the boy, a nice nod to the fact that boys can be baby-sitters too.)
Also I also forgot that Kristy cried. Kristy! :(
Another thing that I considered when reading this was that this book came out in 1986, during the first few years of the AIDS crisis-- with Stacey being forced to keep her illness a secret, I wonder if some people were wondering if that was it. Laine does stay away from her worried that whatever she has is infectious, after all. Possibly I'm overthinking it, but I just suspect that a kid having "a mystery illness" in the 1980s might cause a lot of problems (thanks for letting her tell her New York friends what was going on, Stacey's parents!).
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(Anonymous) - 2016-05-17 02:05 (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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— SMS is apparently the only middle school in Stoneybrook which I’m gonna just take as early instalment weirdness. Because Stoneybrook Day School, Stoneybrook Academy, and Kelsey. Or I guess it also could be informed by Stacey having a totally different frame of reference for what constitutes a tiny town. The way she talks about Stoneybrook, it's like she's moved to Dungatar (the town in The Dressmaker, which I'm reading rn and was the first tiny town I thought of). Stoneybrook is not Dungatar.
— Janine FREAKING OUT over the Baby-Sitters Agency, awww <3
— If Stoneybrook is as small as Stacey's narration makes me imagine, the Agency should flop immediately because parents would already know (or know of) Liz and Michelle. Or, at the very least, Kristy and MA would know who they are if they're in the grade immediately above. I guess this is just Stacey's NYC frame of reference at work again? Stoneybrook sounds like a decent-sized town to me.
— I tried the milky-way-bars-in-the-freezer thing once. It sucked :( from memory, they were that horrible combination of way too hard, becoming way too chewy. Though I've since learned that what we call milky ways aren't the same thing what the USA calls milky ways, so maybe it works better with a USA milky way. Feel free to test this and report back! :D
— I love this:
"I have two more thoughts," Kristy went on.
She was speaking hesitantly, and I noticed Claudia glance at her sharply.
CLAUDIA’S RADAR FOR KRISTY GOING TOO FAR HAS A LIFETIME OF FINE TUNING LMAO <3
— I said this somewhere up the page, but the point where I feel worst for Kristy in this book is when she's all “why didn’t WE think of balloons?” Something about the helplessness of it gets me even more than when she cries.
— Aww Charlie taking DM to watch cheerleader practice. And he learns the cheers and performs them at home! <3
— MA's really specific skill of nailing The Little Engine That Could made me grin really hard.
— Stacey buys a dinosaur pin for her beret <3 that strikes me as more of a Claudia move than a Stacey one, but that's cool. I love BSC fashion.
— “You’re liars! And… and dirty businesswomen!” is such a winner insult.
— Stacey's cheer has never ever managed to leave my brain. Rah rah rah! Sis boom bah! Something... something... the Baby-Sitters Club! Hooray!
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(Anonymous) - 2016-05-18 02:31 (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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-So, fun story: as ESL, I was always learning new English words from BSC books, and rereading, I suddenly remembered that for this one it was “competition”, which is what Claudia calls the Baby Sitters Agency. Will probably be finding these all over the rereads, lol.
-I love how Stacey says that Claudia is her best friend but she also doesn’t know what [she] would do without Kristy and Mary Anne, awww. The divides (at first) in the club are also interesting, character-wise: Kristy and Stacey are ferociously protective of the club for different reasons, and so they’re the ones who want to take immediate action against the agency while Claudia and Mary Anne want to wait it out.
-Mary Anne is not very close to her strict father.
Hmmm, I feel like at this point, AMM was still feeling out how she should characterize Richard, since he had yet to make an on-page appearance. That said, Mary Anne is one of the first who suggests going to their parents for advice on what to do about the kids being mistreated.
-Haha, does anybody remember Mary Anne’s Atlanta Pig Farm call in Poor Mallory? This was the first thing I thought of when she had her brain wave in calling the agency.
-I don’t remember how dark Stacey’s thoughts got re: her diagnosis. Learning Maureen and Edward couldn’t have kids anymore then wondering what if she’d died and they’d been childless…those are really harsh things to think of, let alone to digest when you’re twelve. : (
- I really like the whole sense we get of families that grew up next door to each other helping each other out. Awwww at the Thomas(-Brewers) having Thanksgiving with the Spiers, and Elizabeth taking Jamie to the office.
-Uh, Charlie, you may not have a thing for Big Brother Parties but you damn well deserved one after Friends Forever #1.
-Mallory went back and forth between charges and babysitters – oh hey, foreshadowing.
-I always assumed Claudia was Jamie’s favorite, but here he cries about Kristy hmmm. I guess because she has the more dominant personality and her absence makes more of an impact. They’re all so great with Jamie here, from giving him a party to all of them giving him gifts.
-CHARLOTTE! :( Becca can’t come soon enough. Childhood bullying is really horrible. And Stacey-Charlotte almost sister feels! Stacey’s pretty great at handling sulky kids- I like how she was honest with Charlotte about money being a good bonus of baby-sitting but she also tells Charlotte how much she sincerely likes baby-sitting for her.
-Also, the way the BSC finally handled the agency was actually rather, ah, professional for 12-year-olds. I like their indecision at first because they didn’t want to ‘rat’ but also how they went to grown-ups for input, because they themselves are just kids after all. And how they all advised the charges to be the one telling their parents.
-So, this book sealed the deal for Stacey being the mature/sophisticated one early on, y/y? Stacey taking charge of what she wants from her treatment is really great, though I reckon a little psychiatry wouldn’t have hurt her after what she went through in NY (it was certainly good for Mary Anne later). And I love how she goes to Dr. Johannsen, how she says it’s MY body to her parents.
-finally, lmao @ Kristy taking the makeovers flyer from Liz and Michelle. Classic Kristy!
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(Anonymous) 2016-05-20 02:56 am (UTC)(link)Is this pretty big as malls go? I grew up in Minnesota so we had the Mall of America which was enormous but also very atypical, and I got the impression that most malls...weren't like that.
I sort of sympathized with Stacey more this time around than I remembered. I'm twice her age and I get nauseating migraines, and I only just learned/worked up the nerve to give myself shots for them every so often. Still, the idea of having to carry those around and be dependent on them is pretty nerve-wracking. Poor kid. :(
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(Anonymous) - 2016-05-20 02:58 (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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(Anonymous) - 2016-05-20 04:23 (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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- Fun fact: my book is obviously one I've bought secondhand. The previous owner was Marisa or Marise - I wonder if she misses her BSC books.
- Omg Stacey not making any friends for a month, until she met Claudia. :(
- One of the things I'm frequently infuriated by is how poor the canon map of Stoneybrook is. And here, Stacey says Fawcett Avenue is "two streets away" from Bradford Court. THE MAP IS SO WRONG.
- Awww Mimi remembering when Richard and Alma went to the hospital ♥
- Even if the sitters in the Baby-sitters Agency are as old as 15 or 16 (it only says "13 and up" on the flyer), that still seems super young to have an 11PM curfew on weeknights.
- Stacey's physical descriptions of the girls after Janine brings the flyer in are SUPER weird.
- I had somehow forgotten about the whole "Candy Kane" dating "Winston Churchill" thing haha. OTP, amirite?
- Stacey talking about her diabetes breaks my heart. You can tell how hard it is for her.
- Ugh these books are so inconsistent with switching out American stuff with what we say/use in Australia. Like "twinkie" is still there but then Maureen is all "you've lost a kilogram!" It's so jarring.
- THE VISOR ♥ Kristy suddenly being in Full President Mode.
- I want fic about the Johanssens being all brainy. Charlotte's mom is a doctor and her dad is an engineer!
- Omg Polly from Polly's Fine Candy. I kind of love the idea of this grumpy old lady who dislikes children running a candy store. I bet Polly is friends with Mrs Porter. OR omg what if Polly is Polly Porter and Morbidda Destiny is just the oldest, crankiest sister, but on Sundays Polly and her other sister go over there for tea and they talk irritably about children while they suck butterscotch candies together. BOOM. NEW HEAD CANON.
- The Spiers and the Thomases having Thanksgiving together! ♥
- Can someone please write a fic about Charlie and David Michael at cheerleader practice, both of them totally enjoying it for different reasons.
- Aww, Stacey cuddling Jamie in the laundry, and Louie leanng on them. Aww ♥ My feels.
- Uggghhh Stacey's parents are making me so mad. I know their hearts are in the right place, but NO, you guys.
- Oh, the scene with Stacey and Dr. Johanssen ♥
- Stacey and Pete are adorable.
- MARY ANNE AND MIMI FEELS ♥ I'm impressed Mary Anne learned how to make hats before she could make scarves.
- Lmao Kristy confronting Mrs Newton.
- Ugggh the Agency sending "false sitters" makes me SO ANGRY.
- Wow, NYC is a two hour drive? Why did I think it was closer? And Abby's mom commutes that every day in the later books! I thought MY commute was bad (1.5 hours in the car each way.)
Ugh two hours, nooo.
- God, Ed and Maureen are fucking clueless. Thank god they come to their senses.
- Stacey and Laine making up is really sweet ♥ I love that they just start talking about dumb stuff and mutual people they know.