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A review by finesilkflower
Kristy's Book by Ann M. Martin, Jeanne Betancourt
3.0
The Portrait Collection is a series of the Baby-sitters Club girls' school-assigned "autobiographies," which take the form of 2- to 3-chapter short stories about their childhoods. I'll summarize and review each story individually.
Age 5: Kristy’s first great idea: she, Claudia, and Mary Anne build decorative snowmen for their neighbors in exchanges for donations to the Mimi birthday present fund. Brief and fine.
Age 5 1/2: Kristy cons her way along on a movies trip with her big brothers, breaking rules and worrying her mother, who expects to find her home. Kristy’s father, Patrick, laughs it off, saying she has "spunk," but her mother punishes her. An incident which neatly showcases Kristy's bond with her older brothers and her mother's and father's opposing parenting styles (responsible vs. irr-).
Age 6: After Kristy’s father leaves and her mother gets a job, Kristy, Sam, and Charlie are left on their own after school for a few weeks. They get into scrapes, notably when Louie is sprayed by a skunk, until their mother imposes clear rules and expectations. This is the story we've all been waiting for, really, showing what it was really like in those early days, with Kristy as troublesome yet way-too-responsible kid and Charlie and Sam as baby-sitter types.
Age 10: Kristy wins a scholarship to a girls’ softball camp where she helps overcome the red team-vs-blue team infighting that threatens to ruin the team spirit of the all-camp team. Yawwwn but I guess we needed a baseball story.
Age 13(+?): Kristy’s mysterious father returns in the wake of a break-up with his new wife; wreaks minor havor with Kristy’s emotions; and then disappears again. This last entry happens after Watson is established as Kristy’s stepfather, so it’s actually during the continuity of the BSC books, raising the question: why wasn’t it actually a book? True, Kristy’s father is much more a presence in the entirety of this book than he has been in the entirety of the rest of the series, but it would have been nice to have an actual, more canonical story involving Patrick. More than enough material for the plot of a BSC book is jammed into these three chapters, which read like a summary for an actual story, perhaps because they were salvaged from one. It’s so summarized that it is actually boring to read, despite the inherent interest value of the storyline.
Lingering Questions: WHY. WHY DID WE NOT GET A WHOLE BOOK ABOUT PATRICK.
Grade: For her autobiography effort, Kristy gets a B+. Why? The teacher wrote nothing but good comments. Where did she lose points? This is just like in ninth grade when Jason E. and I suspected that the English teacher's subjective grading was more based on past work and other assorted biases (i.e. lower grades for students who she deemed loud or disruptive in class or who were boys) than our actual work on any individual assignment. We came up with this great scheme where we simply swapped our names on a typical assignment. I usually got A's and he usually got C's so if it was reversed, we'd be proved correct. And lo and behold, "his" (actually my) assignment got a C and "my" (actually his) assignment got an A! We were correct! And we... didn't do anything else about it, as I recall. Just sort of smirked and basked in our rightness. Should we have told somebody? Ugh, fourteen-year-olds.
Read as a kid: No. One of the last BSC books I read as a kid was Claudia's portrait book, which came out in March 1995--second of the Portrait Collections. Kristy's was fifth, in September 1996, by which time I had deemed myself "too old for" the baby-sitters club. And yet. And yet.
Age 5: Kristy’s first great idea: she, Claudia, and Mary Anne build decorative snowmen for their neighbors in exchanges for donations to the Mimi birthday present fund. Brief and fine.
Age 5 1/2: Kristy cons her way along on a movies trip with her big brothers, breaking rules and worrying her mother, who expects to find her home. Kristy’s father, Patrick, laughs it off, saying she has "spunk," but her mother punishes her. An incident which neatly showcases Kristy's bond with her older brothers and her mother's and father's opposing parenting styles (responsible vs. irr-).
Age 6: After Kristy’s father leaves and her mother gets a job, Kristy, Sam, and Charlie are left on their own after school for a few weeks. They get into scrapes, notably when Louie is sprayed by a skunk, until their mother imposes clear rules and expectations. This is the story we've all been waiting for, really, showing what it was really like in those early days, with Kristy as troublesome yet way-too-responsible kid and Charlie and Sam as baby-sitter types.
Age 10: Kristy wins a scholarship to a girls’ softball camp where she helps overcome the red team-vs-blue team infighting that threatens to ruin the team spirit of the all-camp team. Yawwwn but I guess we needed a baseball story.
Age 13(+?): Kristy’s mysterious father returns in the wake of a break-up with his new wife; wreaks minor havor with Kristy’s emotions; and then disappears again. This last entry happens after Watson is established as Kristy’s stepfather, so it’s actually during the continuity of the BSC books, raising the question: why wasn’t it actually a book? True, Kristy’s father is much more a presence in the entirety of this book than he has been in the entirety of the rest of the series, but it would have been nice to have an actual, more canonical story involving Patrick. More than enough material for the plot of a BSC book is jammed into these three chapters, which read like a summary for an actual story, perhaps because they were salvaged from one. It’s so summarized that it is actually boring to read, despite the inherent interest value of the storyline.
Lingering Questions: WHY. WHY DID WE NOT GET A WHOLE BOOK ABOUT PATRICK.
Grade: For her autobiography effort, Kristy gets a B+. Why? The teacher wrote nothing but good comments. Where did she lose points? This is just like in ninth grade when Jason E. and I suspected that the English teacher's subjective grading was more based on past work and other assorted biases (i.e. lower grades for students who she deemed loud or disruptive in class or who were boys) than our actual work on any individual assignment. We came up with this great scheme where we simply swapped our names on a typical assignment. I usually got A's and he usually got C's so if it was reversed, we'd be proved correct. And lo and behold, "his" (actually my) assignment got a C and "my" (actually his) assignment got an A! We were correct! And we... didn't do anything else about it, as I recall. Just sort of smirked and basked in our rightness. Should we have told somebody? Ugh, fourteen-year-olds.
Read as a kid: No. One of the last BSC books I read as a kid was Claudia's portrait book, which came out in March 1995--second of the Portrait Collections. Kristy's was fifth, in September 1996, by which time I had deemed myself "too old for" the baby-sitters club. And yet. And yet.