Scaling Up! Best Babysitters Ever: The Good, The Bad, and the Bossy by Caroline Cala

There's such a thing as too much of a good thing.  Best Babysitters, Inc., is a success: their treasury is well on its way to affording their primary goal for a birthday extravaganza- three tickets for the VERONICA CONCERT. Malia loves sitting for the Hoovers, strategically located for her primary pasttime, with super-cute Connor Kelly sightings right next door. Unknown to her nature-crazy mother, Dot has funded a secret hoard of contraband cosmetics and junk food, and Bree at last has her very own (albeit extremely cantankerous) cat which she names Veronica.

But success has its downside: the three in-demand babysitters find themselves in a time crunch: Malia's evil older stepsister signs her up for a "junior internship" for a Cruella de Ville-type boss; the science fair is growing nigh and Dot has not had time to think up a winning project yet; and Bree's cat has destroyed everything in her glitter-filled room, pooped inside the grand piano, scratched her fiercely, and she hasn't a clue how to bond with her demonic feline.

So the next board meeting of Best Babysitters is a glum session. The business is expanding exponentially, but the sitters' time is not. Their customers are happy but the girls are stressed and exhausted. It's a textbook case of business burnout.

"I have an idea," said Malia, pausing for maximum effect. "We hire satellite babysitters."

"You mean like employees?" asked Dot.

"But... we actually like babysitting," said Bree. "If we give our jobs away, won't that be sad?"

"That's why this plan seems like the best of both worlds," said Malia, campaigning hard for her proposal. "We can take the jobs we want, earn money... AND have time for everything else we have going on!"

What could possibly go wrong?

In the second book in Caroline Cala's comic middle-school series, The Good, the Bad, and the Bossy (Best Babysitters Ever) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), the babysitting tyros discover that scaling up a business model requires some, er, modifications in operations, and perhaps even a strategic RIF (reduction in force). Their new recruits--Pigeon de Palma, Brodford Smitherington III, a.k.a. Brody, and Sage Andrews--turn out to be gifted, virtual doppelgangers of themselves, and perhaps too good at babysitting, endearing themselves to their clients too much and, in Bree's case, Brody practically moves in with her own family  Malia proposes a new management scheme.

"It was time to say goodbye to the satellite sitters. It was time to take back their babysitting business and their lives."

Perhaps it's just time to return to their boutique business model, in author Cala's delightful follow-up to her first book, Best Babysitters Ever. (review here). In a believable and upbeat look at middle-school angst, this new title offers a deepening of the characterization of the main characters and some intriguing new characters in a light and lively, truly funny look at making it through seventh grade with friends and self esteem intact. And who doesn't want that?

Be sure to watch for the third book in this series, Miss Impossible (Best Babysitters Ever), forthcoming February 4, 2020.