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A review by finesilkflower
Baby-Sitters' Summer Vacation by Ann M. Martin
3.0
The entire club gets summer jobs as counselors-in-training at a summer camp.
Even Stacey and Logan! (Mallory and Jessi are "junior CITS", a new position made up just for them because Mallory is a squeaky wheel, which basically means they are campers.) The gimmick of this one is that Stacey is making everyone write notebook entries on their camp experiences so she can have a BSC keepsake. Postcards to family members and friends back in Stoneybrook start each chapter.
This is one of the better Super Specials; while it still has more storylines than pages, it manages to decently flesh out each one, perhaps by limiting narrators to just club members. Mal and Jessi are in the same bunk, so they essentially have one story, in which Mal is sort of blissfully outcasty and Jessi is uncomfortably aware of it, and both get called racist nicknames. Mary Anne and Logan also show two POVs on the same story, in which Mary Anne, desperate to prove herself to the other CITs in her bunk, who are more grown-up and sophisticated and bad-girlish, attempts to sneak to the boys’ side to visit Logan. Kristy faces a similar problem at her bunk, as the other CITs make her over, putting makeup on her and making her feel a profound sense of discomfort and anguish at the Made Up Kristy (whom Kristy insists is not her) that I’m starting to think gender dysphoria. Claudia falls in love with a boy CIT, Dawn gets lost in the woods with her campers, and Stacey contracts every rash and petty camp illness known to man.
Continuity Oddity: Claudia writes to Mimi as "Mrs. L. Yamamoto," making me wonder what Mimi’s real first name can possibly be, especially considering that "L" is not a letter that exists in romanized Japanese. Jessi addresses her letter to her parents to Mr. and Mrs. Alex Ramsey, and while Alex is certainly a cute name for a dad to have, I would assume that father of John Phillip Ramsey, Jr., is named John Phillip Ramsey.
Read as a kid: Yes.
Timing: I’m placing this here to coincide with its release date, but there’s no real canonically obvious place to put it; it occurs during Stacey’s time in New York (books 13-27), but there are no other summer vacation books in that period. Further narrowing down the time frame, Claudia writes to Mimi, so it has to be before book #26.
The question here is, is this the summer between eighth and ninth grades? Books 23 and 24--the Spring Break and Mother’s Day books--seem to be leading in that direction, calendar-event-wise. On the other hand, this would mean that books 26-33 encapsulate a complete year, since book #34 states that it’s the beginning of summer vacation. Given that it took seven books to get from the beginning of eighth grade to Halloween, it seems unlikely that we would blow through an entire year in just seven more. On the other hand, all of seventh grade only took nine books.
An alternate option would be to declare Super Special non-canon. This would be good for my sanity, since I can’t believe that seven girls with so much contempt for rich people could ever go on that many vacations. It would also set a precedent which would allow me to discount mysteries and other specials which might throw off my whole timeline. However, many of thebooks in the main continuity refer to past Super Special events. It’s clear that we’re supposed to consider them canon.
In the interest of granting all of the books equal weight, and using all of the clues at my disposal to determine the timeline, I have chosen to interpret this as a complete summer. Therefore, we have now officially reached THE END OF EIGHTH GRADE. For future books, I will include a new section, Revised Timeline, in which I will explain what year it would be for the (older) girls if they actually changed grades with each year’s passage. (Subtract two years at any given point for Mallory’s and Jessi’s status.) Since the girls don’t, actually, ever escape middle school in the actual books, the original Timing category should still be understood to contain the unsaid, "of eighth grade."
Even Stacey and Logan! (Mallory and Jessi are "junior CITS", a new position made up just for them because Mallory is a squeaky wheel, which basically means they are campers.) The gimmick of this one is that Stacey is making everyone write notebook entries on their camp experiences so she can have a BSC keepsake. Postcards to family members and friends back in Stoneybrook start each chapter.
This is one of the better Super Specials; while it still has more storylines than pages, it manages to decently flesh out each one, perhaps by limiting narrators to just club members. Mal and Jessi are in the same bunk, so they essentially have one story, in which Mal is sort of blissfully outcasty and Jessi is uncomfortably aware of it, and both get called racist nicknames. Mary Anne and Logan also show two POVs on the same story, in which Mary Anne, desperate to prove herself to the other CITs in her bunk, who are more grown-up and sophisticated and bad-girlish, attempts to sneak to the boys’ side to visit Logan. Kristy faces a similar problem at her bunk, as the other CITs make her over, putting makeup on her and making her feel a profound sense of discomfort and anguish at the Made Up Kristy (whom Kristy insists is not her) that I’m starting to think gender dysphoria. Claudia falls in love with a boy CIT, Dawn gets lost in the woods with her campers, and Stacey contracts every rash and petty camp illness known to man.
Continuity Oddity: Claudia writes to Mimi as "Mrs. L. Yamamoto," making me wonder what Mimi’s real first name can possibly be, especially considering that "L" is not a letter that exists in romanized Japanese. Jessi addresses her letter to her parents to Mr. and Mrs. Alex Ramsey, and while Alex is certainly a cute name for a dad to have, I would assume that father of John Phillip Ramsey, Jr., is named John Phillip Ramsey.
Read as a kid: Yes.
Timing: I’m placing this here to coincide with its release date, but there’s no real canonically obvious place to put it; it occurs during Stacey’s time in New York (books 13-27), but there are no other summer vacation books in that period. Further narrowing down the time frame, Claudia writes to Mimi, so it has to be before book #26.
The question here is, is this the summer between eighth and ninth grades? Books 23 and 24--the Spring Break and Mother’s Day books--seem to be leading in that direction, calendar-event-wise. On the other hand, this would mean that books 26-33 encapsulate a complete year, since book #34 states that it’s the beginning of summer vacation. Given that it took seven books to get from the beginning of eighth grade to Halloween, it seems unlikely that we would blow through an entire year in just seven more. On the other hand, all of seventh grade only took nine books.
An alternate option would be to declare Super Special non-canon. This would be good for my sanity, since I can’t believe that seven girls with so much contempt for rich people could ever go on that many vacations. It would also set a precedent which would allow me to discount mysteries and other specials which might throw off my whole timeline. However, many of thebooks in the main continuity refer to past Super Special events. It’s clear that we’re supposed to consider them canon.
In the interest of granting all of the books equal weight, and using all of the clues at my disposal to determine the timeline, I have chosen to interpret this as a complete summer. Therefore, we have now officially reached THE END OF EIGHTH GRADE. For future books, I will include a new section, Revised Timeline, in which I will explain what year it would be for the (older) girls if they actually changed grades with each year’s passage. (Subtract two years at any given point for Mallory’s and Jessi’s status.) Since the girls don’t, actually, ever escape middle school in the actual books, the original Timing category should still be understood to contain the unsaid, "of eighth grade."