Ready, Set, Babysit! Best Babysitters Ever by Caroline Cala

The epiphany came during the worst week ever.

It was only October and so far, seventh grade was turning out to be all kinds of meh.

Malia's malaise was distracted by a box outside the public library with a sign that said FREE STUFF.

Malia noticed a little yellow corner peeking out of the jumble. She pulled it loose to reveal an ancient paperback. Its cover was wrinkled and worn. The Babysitters' Club was spelled out in red-lettered alphabet blocks, followed by the title Kristy's Great Idea.

Four Friends and baby-sitting--what could be more fun? read the tagline.

Malia mentally yawned, wondering if middle-schoolers back in the '90s really thought minding gross little preschoolers was fun. She and her best friends, Bree and Dot, had their minds on their upcoming joint birthday party, which just had to be something special to compete with their peers turning-teen birthday shindigs--with posh bat mitzvahs and real elephant rides. But as she speed-read the first chapter, Malia had an idea. Could she and her friends make use of Kristy's idea and make enough cash to throw a memorable bash--one exciting enough to impress her snooty big sister Chelsea and the most perfect boy in seventh grade, Connor Kelly? Oh, and maybe then Malia can get everyone to remember to call her Alia (the M is silent).

Her two friends jump on her idea for their own reasons. Dot's hippy-ish nature-advocate mother bans anything with sugar, glutin or "chemicals," and Dot needs junk food and real deodorant that works instead of dried twig snacks and mineral rocks to apply to her underarms. Bree's needs are more simple; she wants clothes like her older stepsister Ariana and a cat of her own, and she absolutely must meet Taylor Swift. A quick survey of their little beach town reveals a desperate market for occasional babysitters. All three friends agree--it's time they join the gig economy and fund their own wishes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything. The first sitting jobs go well, with all three girls reporting for duty. Their e-mail blasts keep them busy for the first week. And when they learn that trendy blue-haired singer VERONICA herself is doing a concert in their little beach town of Playa del Mar, the three think big, planning their joint birthday party at Marvelous Ray's arcade, after which they and guests would all go to the concert. Perfect!

But then Malia posts a lame website for their services, with their initials in a giant font across the top, using her favored name Alia:

B ree  A lia D ot

Babysitters!

Dot blinked three times. "This is may be the worst business acronym ever."

And then Malia/Alia's older sister Chelsea takes over their idea, calling her babysitting agency the Seaside Sitters, and stealing their best clients by under-bidding their prices. Bree and Malia and Dot try to undercut Chelsea's clique's pricing and foolishly book themselves to oversee thirty-three kids at a swanky do at an immaculate and lavishly furnished mansion on a bluff scarily overlooking the Pacific Ocean. What can happen? Anything that can go wrong goes wrong!

Is their money-making Babysitters Club II a bust? Will the three Best Friends Forever suffer a big breakup?

Never! In the best tradition of best friends books, they make up instead of break up, and a triple birthday bash comes off after all, in Caroline Cala's hilarious take-off on Ann M. Martin's smash Babysitters Club series, Best Babysitters Ever (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) With the same lighthearted look at middle-school angst and diverse characters that made Martin's venerable series memorable, Cala's treatment of early adolescence, spot-on with all the sudden self-consciousness and the usual sibling friction, parental foibles, first crushes, and classmate rivalries, is refreshingly upbeat and humorously hopeful, a novel which will even make middle readers laugh a little at themselves. Says the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, "Even readers who have never had the pleasure of hanging out with the BC girls of yore will find Malia, Bree, and Dot all likable in their distinct ways, and they’ll appreciate the book’s mix of snark and heart."

Unforeseen Consequences! Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down by Jeff Kinney

Mom thought that I belonged in Talented and Gifted, so she tried to convince the school to let me in. But I had to take a test to prove I was smart. I don't remember everything on the test, but I do remember one of the questions.

Fill in the blank:

Johnny is the best at math.
Johnny is the best at swimming.
Johnny is the best at reading.
Johnny is _______________.

I guess I was supposed to write down something else he was best at. But I really didn't like this Johnny character, so I wrote

Johnny is a show-off.

Greg doesn't make the Talented and Gifted class, but Mom doesn't give up on self-improvement programs for her middle son. But Greg seems to have a talent only for non-stop video games.

Then, as Halloween decorations start to go up, Greg finds a goal that will definitely improve his life--getting invited to Mariana Mendoza's Halloween party.

Mariana's parties are kind of legendary because her parents don't care WHAT goes on as long as it stays in the basement.

But this year Mariana's parents are putting the squeeze on the guest list to only kids in the band.

I got a genius idea. If I join the BAND, I can get invited. Mom was really excited that I wanted to challenge myself. Dad said instruments are EXPENSIVE and I wouldn't stick to it.

Greg winds up with left-handed French horn, because it has only three keys. Dad insists that he has to practice every night. Since Greg can't seem to get anything but really rude noises out of his horn, he comes up with a way to keep Dad happy. He goes to Youtube on his PC.

Luckily I found some video clips of a girl practicing HER French horn, which are doing the trick, a least for now.

But then Greg learns that Mariana's parents have limited the invitations to her section of the band, the woodwinds.

But then I realized I've got an IN. Rowley's part of the woodwind section, so I realized that if I make myself part of Rowley's COSTUME, then wherever he goes I go.

Greg's ever-eager mom is on it and cheerfully contributes two perfectly-good sheets to their costume, sewing them into it together so that Greg and Rowley can go to the party as a two-headed man. Mom, inspired by the Mendoza's laissez faire parenting and Family Frolics magazine, throws herself into leading the games, and to Greg's great embarrassment, she's the hit of the party. But even with his mom there, the party is a blast, and the double-headed dudes party hearty, dancing with all the girls... until Rowley makes an unfortunate announcement.

Right when the party was about to hit the next level, Rowley told me he needed to use the bathroom.

We didn't PLAN for that.The only way out of the costume was to cut it off. Neither of us was wearing pants underneath, so THAT wasn't happening.

Once more, poor Greg Heffley finds himself the victim of unforeseen consequences, in Jeff Kinney's latest, Double Down (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 11) (Amulet Books, 2016), in which Kinney's hapless middle-schooler's misadventures continue in the eleventh in his best-selling series. The author-illustrator has the knack of offering up hilarious episode after episode without losing sight of the human side of the whole Heffley family, as his hapless tweener makes his way through those hard-scrabble middle-school years. Like Peter Pan, maybe Greg Heffley will never grow up, keeping even reluctant readers flocking by the millions to his cartoon-illustrated best-sellers.

For more of Greg's laugh-out-loud adventures, see reviews here.

Standard Operating Procedure? The Friendship Experiment by Erin Teagan

I can't get used to the idea of this estate sale. All these people, touching all of Grandpa's stuff, pulling things off shelves, carrying them off to who knows where. Probably a good thing Grandpa's not alive to see this.

"I'm Riley," she says "Does this still work?" A girl stands in front of me. I can't believe what she's holding in her hand. "Not for sale!" I say, taking the gold clock away from her. She probably took it right of Grandpa's desk. It even has his name, LEONARD LITTLE, BIOCHEMIST.

I wish there was an Standard Operating Procedure for all of this that would fix everything. Grandpa would know how to write it. But now that he's gone, it's up to me.

To Maddie, it seems as if everyone is moving away from her at warp speed. Grandpa is dead, her best friend Elizabeth is going to a fancy middle school, and even her thirteen-year-old sister Brooke is disappearing into a teen world of cheerleaders and boys, and has moved out of their room for the basement, ostensibly to escape Maddie's smelly Petri dish experiments.

At least she has a new job as student assistant with her dad's lab, where he is working with a rare enzyme to cure the familial blood disease, Von Willebrand's disease, which causes Brook's frequent nosebleeds. But Maddie inadvertently leaves the vial of the enzyme out of the freezer, threatening the success of her father's research, and Dad bars her from the lab.

Maddie takes a blank lab notebook from Grandpa's house which she uses to skewer her classmates with SOPs--standard operating procedures--directed sarcastically toward everyone, Elizabeth for finding new friends, Riley for bragging about astronaut camp and wearing noisy bangle bracelets, and her independent study classmates for being, well, themselves, not Elizabeth.

But the SOPs don't help. Made to go to Riley's birthday party, Maddie actually has a good time with Riley, who shows her the precious meteorite. But when she accidentally leaves her lab book behind, Riley reads what is inside and is so hurt that she shares its contents with their classmates, and Maddie finds herself spending lunch periods in the girls' bathroom alone. To make things even worse, Maddie has her first nosebleed like Brooke's, bleeding all over the team jersey of Brooke's secret crush, soccer star Dexter Sully.

And hiding out one lunch period in the restroom, she finds Brooke, with a rapidly swelling elbow. Maddie knows Brooke has a dangerous subcutaneous bleed, but Brooke refuses to call their parents and slams angrily out to make the scheduled cheerleader photo for the annual. But by the time Maddie boards her bus after school, she sees her sister being loaded on a gurney and taken to the hospital.

I wonder how all of this happened. How could I let everything get so out of control? Not only does everyone at school hate me for the mean things I wrote in my notebook, but I walked away from Brooke when she needed me. And I ruined Dad's research.

You can't write a standard operating procedure for all of life, Maddie learns, in Erin Teagan's new The Friendship Experiment (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). And when Maddie remembers Grandpa's own formula, "Always be kind," she begins to put things to rights, re-writing a set of procedures for success in middle school and in her family, and things begin to change. Author Teagan keeps the story real but upbeat, with a family which deals positively with whatever comes, and despite her inauspicious first days of middle school, Maddie musters her spirit and moves on hopefully. Like that classic story of another middle grader whose misplaced secret and sarcastic notebook gets her in trouble with her classmates (Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy), this is a middle-school novel which deals less with social popularity per se, but rather more with the protagonist's internal understanding of other people's feelings, making it a very welcome addition to this genre.

Prequel: The Summer Before by Ann M. Martin

It was quite a summer.

When Mary Anne and Claudia and Stacey and I talked about it later (when we were older), we discovered that during those long, hot months we had all, separately, felt that we didn't quite belong where we were. Not one of us. Up until that summer we hadn't paid much attention to such things. But by the end of it everything was different. We were different.

The summer brought the four of us together to form the Babysitters Club--something we would belong to, in one sense or another, for the rest of our lives.

It has been 25 years since Anne M. Martin's Kristy's Great Idea (The Babysitters Club) debuted with the story of four twelve-year-olds beginning middle school and forming their own all-for-one and one-for-all business, a small book which seemed inevitably to introduce a best-selling series. Now Martin celebrates the refurbished reissue of this evergreen series with its own prequel, a snapshot in time of her four classic characters in that pivotal summer before middle school.

In a way, Mary Anne's confused feelings represent those of the group. Mary Anne chafes at the babyish style of her all-pink bedroom which her dad decorated for her third birthday. In fact, her problem is too much dad. Her widowed father still picks out her clothes and styles her hair in two little-girl ribboned pigtails which she senses embarrass her friends as much as they do her. And when a neighbor calls to ask if she can sit with her child for a short afternoon session, Mary Anne, herself wondering if she can handle the responsibility, resents her father's rule that she can only take the job if she can persuade one of her friends to stay with her. The babysitter needs a babysitter, Mary Anne fumes to herself.

Kristy, on the other hand, feels like she's frozen in place, still longing for her absent dad while her mom finds a new boyfriend, Watson, and her brothers embrace their busy high school lives without a backward look. Kristy is hung up on whether her distant dad will even acknowledge her twelfth birthday, and as that day draws nearer over the summer, Kristy feels somehow incapable of going forward into her new life in middle school.

Claudia, on the other hand, is all too eager to play the teenager. She has the right flair for teen clothes, an appealing, new bikini for the end-of-school boy-girl pool party, and then amazingly, her first boyfriend, her big sister's ninth-grade classmate, Frankie, who suddenly wants to spend a lot of the long summer days with just her. Feeling flattered by the older boy's attention, Claudia drifts away from her two old friends, and when Frankie eventually dumps her for more sophisticated girls, Claudia, too, feels adrift.

And miles and miles away, in New York City, Stacey is all too eager to leave her sixth-grade life behind for a different reason. Suddenly diagnosed with diabetes, Stacey misses a lot of school while she adjusts to the disease and discovers that she is now a pariah, someone different, the object of ridicule by her lifelong best friend, now enemy, Laine. To Stacey, spending her summer packing away her old life, Stoneybrook Middle School offers a much-needed new start on her life.

With the first titles in her much-loved series now updated for minor atmospherics and dressed up in new covers, The Babysitters Club is again accessible to the daughters of its earlier devotees, and with its new prequel, The Summer Before (Babysitters Club) (Scholastic, 2010), the series is ready for new readers. Martin takes up her familiar iconic characters without missing a beat, her acknowledged honesty and insight into the middle-school mind intact, turning out another of her patented good reads. With overarching theme of the value of strong friendships in the maturational process, these books are as relevant as ever. And, as Kirkus Reviews says, sweetly but not disingenuously, "Book candy at its best."

Good Boy! Boys Are Dogs by Leslie Margolis

Annabelle had lived a sheltered life. Her elementary school was just for girls, so through fifth grade, for her and for her girlfriends Mia and Sophia, boys were not an issue. At dance night at summer camp, however, Annabelle gets her first inkling of the fact that boys are a different species, if not actually aliens from planet Mars.

On the night of the dance we decorated the room with streamers and decorated ourselves with cool outfits, cherry flavored lip gloss, and glittery eye shadow.

We looked fabulous. We tried out our goofy new dance moves, wolfed down pretzels, and sipped punch. It was a blast. Fantastic. Some even called it blast-tastic. But that was all before the boys showed up.

They filed off the bus, messy-haired and slouchy. Every single one of them wore regular old shorts or jeans and ratty T-shirts.

Once inside, they stood in one corner in an unfriendly, lumpy clump. Instead of dancing, they pushed each other around. Rather than eat our food, they threw it at one another. Then they tore down our streamers. At some point a bunch of them snuck out and threw eggs at our cabins.

Then Annabelle is forced to move and finds herself in a regular middle school with a bunch of tweener boys whose behavior is even worse than that of the regrettable boy campers. Eighth grader Jackson, whose sister kindly befriends Annabelle right away, calls her Spazabelle, steals her book report and drops it in cafeteria catsup, and generally makes her want to hide whenever he comes into sight. Tobias, the boy behind her in English, kicks the back of her seat every 60 seconds throughout the whole period and when he turns out to be her science lab partner, hogs the microscope and refuses to let her do her assignment.

The rest of the boys she meets are, from her point of view, rude, sloppy, and totally out of control. Finally, Annabelle surprises herself in English class on Monday:

Something weird happened at school on Monday. As soon as Tobias' foot made contact with my chair, I turned around and said, "Tobias, stop."

And Tobias actually looked at me. He seemed surprised and a little alarmed, like he didn't know me and maybe realized that I was someone he didn't want to mess with.

Where did that come from? Annabelle wonders. And then it hits her. She is using the same techniques as those in the book she got to train her puppy Pepper.

Talk to dogs in their own language. Your tone is just as important as your words. Don't ask them. Tell them. You're the boss, so act that way.

At home she flips through the dog training book to the section called "HOW TO BE THE DOMINANT DOG."

Think about it this way: in a group of dogs you can always spot a dominant dog in the pack by his swagger. He walks with his chest pushed forward, confidently. This designated leader is in control.

Annabelle thinks about the way Jackson swaggers down the hall, his loyal pack trailing a few paces behind. Then she suddenly gets a mental image of herself at school:

Then I thought about how I'd been walking around school--rushing from place to place, totally lost and confused, my eyes on the ground, my posture hesitant. I'd acted totally weak. No wonder boys picked on me. I was sending out wimpy signals.

Suddenly Annabelle knows what she has to do: train these boys the same way she is teaching Pepper, with confidence, strength, rewards, and praise for good behavior. And it works. Middle school boys don't become gentlemen overnight, but most of them begin to treat her with a decent level of respect. Even in the final showdown, eighth-grade top dog Jackson backs down, and Annabelle knows her days as Spazabelle are almost a thing of the past.

Leslie Margolis' Boys Are Dogs takes on dealing with bullying boys as one of challenges of making it in middle school with ready humor, insight, and skillful writing. In her forthcoming sequel,Girls Acting Catty due out in the fall of 2009, Margolis takes on an even bigger challenge of middle and junior high school--the snooty girl clique. Good luck with that one, Leslie. A lot of girls will be waiting for your take on this challenge!