(by Ann M. Martin, Becky Albertalli, Coe Booth, Sarah Kuhn, Peter Lerangis, Jahnna N. Malcolm, & Emma Straub)
I read a big chunk of this book on a summer Sunday when I was fighting off a cold or something and had a temperature of 100.1 degrees Fahrenheit and couldn’t quite nap all day but also wasn’t up for anything too mentally taxing, and this was such a great book to read in that context. I mean: I probably would have enjoyed it anyway for reasons of nostalgia (I read a whole lot of Baby-Sitters Club books when I was a kid) but as a summer sick day read, this was a total delight. It’s set now-ish (there are references to Hamilton and twerking) but technology doesn’t really feature, which requires a little suspension of disbelief but works for the story: the BSC members are in various different places for the summer, and they send postcards rather than being in touch in some more modern way, which is cute. (It did feel jarring to me when Stacey calls her crush on the phone: if this is set in the 21st century, surely she would just text? That’s a minor quibble though.)
My favorite characters in this series when I was a kid were probably Claudia (I loved the descriptions of her outfits) and Mallory (who loves horses), though people would probably have said I was most like Mary Anne (the most introverted one). In this book, my favorite storylines were Claudia’s and Kristy’s. Claudia is in Little Tokyo in LA for the summer (though the back cover wrongly says she’s in San Francisco), doing her best at a chaotic art camp where she has to both wrangle the kiddos and make her own piece of art honoring an ancestor. Her outfits are amazing as always, and despite some initial struggles she ends up having a really good trip and making a piece of art that she’s happy with. (And I love how she finally bonds with Betty, who is her age and whose grandma was close friends with Claudia’s grandma, over a trip to the candy store and a basket full of fruit-flavored candy.) Kristy is in Massachusetts for the summer with a family she babysits for, and ends up becoming friends with and then having a crush on a cute queer non-sporty photographer girl named Rowan whose family’s summer house is just down the road. (Kristy’s bossiness is a little less on display than usual in this book, and I like how her relationship with Rowan develops.) As for everyone else: Dawn is at a theater camp, Jessi can’t dance due to an injury so tags along on her mom’s college reunion trip, Mallory is visiting family in Ireland, and Mary Anne and Stacey are both at home in Stoneybrook, where Mary Anne decides to start her own lending library and Stacey develops a totally unsurprising crush on a boy at the county fair. I liked certain aspects of most of the stories, particularly a big moment of bravery in Mallory’s plotline and the part of Jessi’s story where she learns about the dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham. (And the part of Stacey’s story where she goes to a coffeeshop called Mugs Are Magic made me pretty sure which writer was responsible for Stacey in this book, ha!)
(Oh, and: I love this book as a physical object: the cover and endpapers and printed page-edges are so colorful and fun!)
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