When Amy announced that she was going to host a Baby-Sitters Club Week, I knew I had to be involved. I signed up to do a review without a second thought. However, when the second thought came around I realized I actually needed to find one of the books to review. A library would have the books, right? To my great disappointment, I found out that neither the Burnaby nor Vancouver public libraries carry the original series anymore. How sad is that? They both carry the updated graphic novel versions, but those aren’t the same.

After a panicked email to a bunch of friends failed to turn up any books, I make a trip to Value Village. I don’t know what I was expecting, but their Teen section was like a trip down memory lane. There were Sweet Valley books galore, plus this book that I loved back in the day about this girl who’s football player boyfriend dies (of cancer?) and she’s all heartbroken until the Spring when she realizes that her boyfriend had planted flowers in the middle of the football field for her. Anyway, it took a bit of searching, and then there they were, dispersed throughout the mess of youthfulness, the first three books in the Baby-Sitters Club series. It was a hard choice, but I decided on book #3 – The Truth About Stacey.

Stacey McGill has missed big city life since she moved from New York City in August, but is enjoying life in small Stoneybrook, CT thanks to her new friends Kristy, Claudia and Mary Anne. Together they’ve even started a business – The Baby-Sitters Club. The Club has been in existence for about two months, providing the families of Stoneybrook with access to four baby-sitters with only one phone call. Business has been good, however that doesn’t mean that the girls can become complacent. Oh, no. There’s trouble a-brewin’.

Enter in the Baby-Sitters Agency, who promise to connect would-be clients with a whole network of baby-sitters through a single phone call. Kristy does some stealthy undercover work and finds out what the deal is. Apparently all parents need to do is call one of the founders of the agency (Liz or Michelle), tell them when they need a baby-sitter, and the girls phone around and set up someone for the appropriate time. And the baby-sitters they have access to are not only older than the girls in the Baby-Sitters Club, but can stay out later, even on weeknights! This is bad news, bad news indeed.

As if this drama isn’t enough to put Stacey in a funk, her parents have decided that she needs to see this supposably awesome new holistic doctor in NYC. You see, Stacey had diabetes and her parents have been dragging her to doctor after doctor after doctor to get this thing cured. But Stacey’s smart, she knows they aren’t going to find a cure, and that the routine they have now is working just fine. How can she convince her parents that going to see this doctor isn’t a good idea?

I’m not going to tell you how everything is resolved, because I know you all want to read this now and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. There’s a whole lot of drama, a bunch of emergency BSC meetings, and more than a few tears. Ann M. Martin throws spies, sabotage, and deception into the mix, but she also includes sweet romances, wild parties, and heartwarming reunions. Really, it has everything a 12-year old would want.

I can’t tell you how much I loved these books when I was a kid. I remember studying the list of BSC titles at the back of each book. It was probably my earliest TBR list. This series made me thing that being a baby-sitter would be great fun. So much that I even took a baby-sitting course, in which we learned how to make our very own Kid Kits (I don’t think that’s what they were called in the course, but the were basically the same thing). How disappointed was I to find out that baby-sitting was not fun. In fact, I greatly disliked it. However, that did not deter me from devouring each and every Baby-Sitters Club book I could get my hands on.

Thanks Amy for organizing this trip down memory lane!