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A review by finesilkflower
Abby and the Secret Society by Ann M. Martin
1.0
Simultaneously bonkers and distasteful.
Abby is bored, so she convinces the club to take part time jobs helping local entrepreneur Nikki Stanton-Cha fix up the old disused Dark Woods Country Club, which was racially exclusionary (as country clubs tend to be), to reopen and rebrand as Greenbrook County Club, a place where everyone is welcome. To prove how not racist she is, Nikki has a Korean husband and a biracial son! Take THAT, white privilege!
While working at the country club, the girls run into their old friend from the police department, Sergeant Johnson, who is investigating a personally significant cold case: the apparently accidental death of his best friend, David Follman, a reporter who had been poking into a "secret society" of important men run out of Dark Woods. The cabal's crime? Blackmailing and extorting people into voting their way on city council elections and using their friends as contractors for city contracts. Which -- call me jaded -- sounds like business as usual corruption in most cities and not something anyone powerful would be seriously punished for, even if it came to light, especially since it's so boring that people aren't likely to have a visceral reaction to it even if the effect is quite bad. Still, Mary Anne for one is shocked. Sergeant Johnson hopes to find out what David knew and establish a motive for murder.
The girls stumble on a sort of treasure hunt David left behind purposefully to lead Sergeant Johnson to his cache of papers. (The place it ends up being is the most obvious place you'd expect so I'm not sure what the point of the clues were.) They end up finding a loosely described bundle of important papers, it's not important, maguffin. Yay, we won!
Meanwhile, Nikki's son tries to make friends with the neighborhood kids, but comes to the conclusion that they are racist and he'd rather not play with them. This shocks the BSC members who think he is overreacting. It turns out that nobody was racist after all, they just needed time to warm up to him! Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. This plotline is extremely poorly handled.
Rant: The way race is handled in this book is super ham-handed and shitty. Racism and exclusion are central concepts to the plot, but they are described in such euphemistic and vague terms that it's impossible to understand unless you already understand the dog whistles; in other words, kids wouldn't get it. The kid-subplot deals with race more openly than the main plot - it's refreshing when Stephen matter of factly says he thinks the other kids don't like him because he is Korean - but this storyline has an actively harmful message, and the baby-sitters are constantly telling Stephen that he, a person of color, is wrong about his perception of other people's racism, there must be another explanation, and in the end it turns out the white people were right. White people are good after all! Barf barf barf.
Lingering Questions: Does this book really expect me to root for a country club owner and buy her spin that it'll be a great place for all families in Stoneybrook? How is it going to work, economically? Because if there's a significant fee to belong, even if it's not openly racially hostile, it will still be overwhelmingly white. If it's free or low-cost or sliding scale, then, how is it making money? How is it feasible to maintain? And why call it a country club, and not, like, a community center? Why is it so important to Nikki - and to the authors of this book - to rehab the image of country clubs?
Where's Jessi during all of this? She's around but only as a minor background character, as if all this doesn't have a special meaning for her. They tried to make Abby have special feelings about this situation by showing how the old country club didn't allow in Jewish people. How do you think they felt about black people, then?! Is it just me, or does this "secret society" feel Klan-adjacent?
Why did David leave behind cryptic clues instead of simply mailing Sergeant Johnson a letter or telling him about the evidence?
As always, I have to ask: what is the DEAL with Sergeant Johnson? Every time he runs into the baby-sitters, he spills his guts to them about his deep emotional trauma, in this case about the death of his best friend. This doesn't seem professional!
Abby is bored, so she convinces the club to take part time jobs helping local entrepreneur Nikki Stanton-Cha fix up the old disused Dark Woods Country Club, which was racially exclusionary (as country clubs tend to be), to reopen and rebrand as Greenbrook County Club, a place where everyone is welcome. To prove how not racist she is, Nikki has a Korean husband and a biracial son! Take THAT, white privilege!
While working at the country club, the girls run into their old friend from the police department, Sergeant Johnson, who is investigating a personally significant cold case: the apparently accidental death of his best friend, David Follman, a reporter who had been poking into a "secret society" of important men run out of Dark Woods. The cabal's crime? Blackmailing and extorting people into voting their way on city council elections and using their friends as contractors for city contracts. Which -- call me jaded -- sounds like business as usual corruption in most cities and not something anyone powerful would be seriously punished for, even if it came to light, especially since it's so boring that people aren't likely to have a visceral reaction to it even if the effect is quite bad. Still, Mary Anne for one is shocked. Sergeant Johnson hopes to find out what David knew and establish a motive for murder.
The girls stumble on a sort of treasure hunt David left behind purposefully to lead Sergeant Johnson to his cache of papers. (The place it ends up being is the most obvious place you'd expect so I'm not sure what the point of the clues were.) They end up finding a loosely described bundle of important papers, it's not important, maguffin. Yay, we won!
Meanwhile, Nikki's son tries to make friends with the neighborhood kids, but comes to the conclusion that they are racist and he'd rather not play with them. This shocks the BSC members who think he is overreacting. It turns out that nobody was racist after all, they just needed time to warm up to him! Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. This plotline is extremely poorly handled.
Rant: The way race is handled in this book is super ham-handed and shitty. Racism and exclusion are central concepts to the plot, but they are described in such euphemistic and vague terms that it's impossible to understand unless you already understand the dog whistles; in other words, kids wouldn't get it. The kid-subplot deals with race more openly than the main plot - it's refreshing when Stephen matter of factly says he thinks the other kids don't like him because he is Korean - but this storyline has an actively harmful message, and the baby-sitters are constantly telling Stephen that he, a person of color, is wrong about his perception of other people's racism, there must be another explanation, and in the end it turns out the white people were right. White people are good after all! Barf barf barf.
Lingering Questions: Does this book really expect me to root for a country club owner and buy her spin that it'll be a great place for all families in Stoneybrook? How is it going to work, economically? Because if there's a significant fee to belong, even if it's not openly racially hostile, it will still be overwhelmingly white. If it's free or low-cost or sliding scale, then, how is it making money? How is it feasible to maintain? And why call it a country club, and not, like, a community center? Why is it so important to Nikki - and to the authors of this book - to rehab the image of country clubs?
Where's Jessi during all of this? She's around but only as a minor background character, as if all this doesn't have a special meaning for her. They tried to make Abby have special feelings about this situation by showing how the old country club didn't allow in Jewish people. How do you think they felt about black people, then?! Is it just me, or does this "secret society" feel Klan-adjacent?
Why did David leave behind cryptic clues instead of simply mailing Sergeant Johnson a letter or telling him about the evidence?
As always, I have to ask: what is the DEAL with Sergeant Johnson? Every time he runs into the baby-sitters, he spills his guts to them about his deep emotional trauma, in this case about the death of his best friend. This doesn't seem professional!