110 reviews for:

The Summer Before

Ann M. Martin

3.61 AVERAGE


Cute! This brings back many memories of reading BSC books.

It was fun to get back into the Babysitter's Club world and it definitely made me want to read a bunch of my favorites from the series. It got a little too cheesy towards the end but the nostalgia makes up for it.

So obviously this is a kid’s book, because the rest of them are kid’s books. But somehow I was expecting something more YA-ish because as a fan of the BSC from the early days I thought a prequel would follow the reading proficiencies of original fans because I DESERVE THAT. However it was a great nostalgic read and would be a great recommendation to BSC fans.

Nostalgia
adventurous emotional lighthearted medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I missed these girls.

Considering I was 4th in line to get Ann M. Martin to autograph my copy of this book, you could say I am a bit of a BSC fan. In fact, what I giddily said to Ann as she signed my book was that the Baby-Sitters Club was the series that made me love reading as a kid. With the exception of the reference to American Girl Dolls, which felt a bit anachronistic, this "prequel" to the series brought childhood memories flooding back.

I don't feel that I'm in a position to fairly review this book, since it's more about nostalgia for me than literary quality. But, I'm excited to see the Baby-Sitters Club making a comeback so that girls today can hopefully get as excited about reading and babysitting as I did when the series first debuted.


Did you ever wonder exactly how the four girls in the original Baby-Sitters Club actually connected and what happened before they formed the club? Well, this book tells the story of those four girls: Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey and their lives the summer before the club.

I do not know that I would suggest reading this book first because I don't think it would have captured my attention quite as well when I was a child as the first book did. This would not make a top twenty or thirty list of my favorite books in the series, but it would not make a list of the worst either. I enjoyed reading it. It made me want to dig out the first books in the series and dive in.

There are some things that I liked quite a bit. I always preferred the books that had a lot of stuff about their families, so I liked that this book had a good amount of Mr. Spier, the Thomases, Mimi, and Janine. I think that Mary Ann finding a box of her mother's things doesn't quite fit the timeline of her finding out more things about her mother, but I always liked that plotline, which means it was easy to ignore. I liked that Kristy's sections talked about her father, whose absence I always thought should have been addressed more often. A lot of kids can relate to this.
SpoilerI think that they should have mentioned that her father came back and visited her secretly once to give Kristy's hopes a little more context.
Even though I had some issues with Stacey's sections that I'm going to go into later, I did like that this gave her a very sympathetic introduction. She's the girl that takes the longest for readers to get to know, so readers don't have to wait until late in the series to learn more about her.

Whoever wrote this definitely had a copy of the Complete Guide and some of the first books in the series next to them, but there are things that bug me as a fan. Stacey's plot has the most issues. Her background is one of the more inconsistent ones, but a lot of the things that happen with her friends do not match the other books in the series. I was really disappointed that we didn't get to see the way that she met Claudia that was previously canon. Bonding over their similar shirts is very them.

I had issues with Claudia's too. It is just too weird that Janine and Claudia fighting over a boy would never have come up again in the series. She also didn't seem quite like herself. It might be because she interacted a lot with people that either had very small roles or were not in the books at all. I do really appreciate that the author was sure to include several scenes with Mimi, which is at the top of my list of what I would want from a prequel.

A sweet book touching lightly on the lives of the original four babysitters during the summer between sixth and seventh grade. Although the action is slight (although not quite slight enough -- Claudia's and Kristy's plotlines would both require some retcon work in the original books to pass as unqualified canon), the emotional content is nicely drawn, with voices and details that feel appropriate for going-into-seventh-graders, and lives that have not yet been complicated by the understandably unrealistic confusions of living eighth grade over and over for ten years running.

The final chapter segues directly into the beginning of Kristy's Great Idea, which will no doubt be a jolt of pleasure to any BSC fans who haven't revisited the books in years, but also tends to emphasize the degree to which the already-short book does not stand on its own and is best enjoyed as part of a nostalgic experience.