The Running Bibliophile

Missing Since Monday by Ann M. Martin follows Maggie and her older brother when their father and stepmother leave on a long-delayed honeymoon, trusting the siblings to care for their four-year-old half sister, Courtenay. When Courtenay fails to come home from daycare one Monday afternoon, Maggie and her brother are thrust into a frightening mystery. With no adults around to help, they must piece together what happened and find a way to alert their parents before it’s too late. This standalone novel for readers ages eight to twelve was one I completely missed as a kid, but as an adult and a longtime fan of Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club  series, I couldn’t resist picking it up. The first chapter or two felt a bit choppy to me at first, but once the story found its footing, everything began to come together nicely . Because this is a short children’s book, the characters aren’t deeply developed, which is to be expected. That said, Martin does an excellent job conveying Maggie’...

Karen's Worst Day (Baby-Sitters Little Sister, #3) by Ann M. Martin opens with Karen Brewer starting her day off wrong when she has a nightmare and falls out of bed.  Things go from bad to worse for Karen, and she's sure nothing will go right. This series is perfect for kids who aren't old enough to read The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin, and it's also perfect for children who have divorced parents since the main character has parents who are no longer together. As for this edition of the Baby-Sitters Little Sister book series, it gives kids a chance to see that if they're having a bad day that it can and will get better, and if parents read it as well, it gives them the perfect opportunity to discuss the topic with their child or children.  With that being said, nothing really happens in Karen's Worst Day .  It's just a day in the life of a six year old girl.  The best lesson of the book is that Karen apologized to the people she treated poorly. I d...

In Karen's Roller Skates (Baby-Sitters Little Sister, #2) by Ann M. Martin, Karen Brewer is staying at her father's house for a long weekend. When she attempts a trick on her roller skates, Karen falls and breaks her wrist. This is the second book in the Baby-Sitters Little Sister series, and it's a super cute book for children between the ages of five and eight. Like the first book in the series, Karen's Witch , it teaches children a lesson . . . don't disobey your parents. The most interesting part of reading this story as an adult was the amount of detail included about getting a cast . . . of course pared down for children to understand. I loved the fact that the author nailed how children try to out do each other. In this case, Karen tries to get someone famous to sign her cast because one of her classmates had someone famous sign his cast. And, of course, Karen exaggerates what happened to cause her to break her wrist and gets caught, which is another great ...

Karen's Witch (Baby-Sitters Little Sister, #1) by Ann M. Martin is the first book in Baby-Sitters Little Sister , which is a spinoff of The Baby-Sitters Club . Karen Brewer only gets to spend every other weekend with her father and his new family. The biggest rule at her father's house is that she's not allowed to spy on the neighbors, which Karen ignores so she can spy on Mrs. Porter, aka Morbidda Destiny, who is a witch. As a tween, I read a few of the books in the Baby-Sitters Little Sister book series, but because the series was a bit young for me so I didn't read very many of the books in this series. I decided to give the first book a read as an adult since I didn't really remember anything about it. I was pleasantly surprised by the storyline of Karen's Witch . It was an engaging read with quite a bit of realism to it. Kids have such an active imagination and sometimes disregard parent's rules, so I loved that Ann M. Martin wrote a book about these ...

Mallory and the Trouble With Twins (The Baby-Sitters Club, #21) by Ann M. Martin is told from Mallory Pike's point of view. When Mallory gets a consistent babysitting job watching over the Arnold twins two days a week, she's thrilled. That is until Marilyn and Carolyn switch places and act like spoiled brats. This edition of The Baby-Sitters Club took me down memory lane as I was obsessed with this series in middle school and desperately wanted to start my own babysitting club. Rereading this as an adult, I was not disappointed. The only thing I remembered about this book was that Mallory desperately wanted pierced ears, but I had forgotten the rest of the storyline.  The thing I most enjoyed about Mallory and the Trouble With Twins is that it explored how twins felt about being treated like the same person just because they look alike. It just shows that there are underlying reasons for why kids may be acting out other than just being a brat. The thing I liked least about t...

Kristy and the Walking Disaster (The Baby-Sitters Club, #20) by Ann M. Martin is told from the point of view of Kristy Thomas, president of The Baby-Sitters Club. Seeing how much her little brother and step siblings enjoy playing softball, she decides to create a softball team of kids, who normally wouldn't be good enough to join a little league team, and names the team Kristy's Krushers. Things get competitive when another team called Bart's Bashers challenges them to a game. One of the things I enjoyed most about Kristy and the Walking Disaster (The Baby-Sitters Club, #20) is the fact that the character of Kristy is being developed a little more and starting to mature. In this book, Kristy actually starts to like boys and has a crush on a guy named Bart Taylor, who is the coach of a softball team called Bart's Bashers. It's nice to see characters that aren't kept in the same box throughout the series. Additionally, it was great that the book addressed bullyi...

Jessi's Secret Language (The Baby-Sitters Club, #16) by Ann M. Martin is about eleven year old Jessi Ramsey agreeing to babysit two days a week for the Braddock kids, nine year old Haley and seven year old Matt. There is one catch, Jessi has to learn sign language because Matt is deaf. On top of this responsibility, Jessi auditions for her dance school's ballet production of Coppelia and lands the lead part, which adds even more rehearsal time to her already busy schedule. There is a lot that I enjoyed about Jessi's Secret Language (The Baby-Sitter's Club, #16) because it teaches kids many life lessons that even some adults could benefit learning about. Namely being accepting and inclusive of people with special needs . . . in this case, learning sign language so that Matt could easily communicate and play with others. I thought the book was well thought out showing how two different families dealt with having a deaf child . . . the Braddocks went out of ...

In the process of rereading books from my childhood, I picked up the book Little Miss Stoneybrook . . . and Dawn (The Baby-Sitters Club, #15) by Ann M. Martin. Typically, I don't care for books that are written about beauty pageants because they don't usually represent them correctly. This book was no exception. One of the reasons I usually take exception to books about pageants is that I participated in them for eleven years (from age 8 through age 19) and have fond memories of them; beauty pageants are usually portrayed in a negative light, especially by those who have never competed in them. After the death of JonBenét Ramsey, beauty pageants were put in more of a negative light. Pageants where contestants wear a lot of makeup started to be referred to as glitz pageants, and many pageants popped up where there was minimal makeup worn. (Yes, I know this book was written pre-JonBenét.) The events in the beauty pageant weren't exactly represented correctly. Ther...

The girls of The Baby-Sitters Club are no strangers to having weird things happen to them since they've started their club. However, nothing has been as weird or spooky as getting mysterious phone calls while on their jobs. Whenever they receive these calls, there is no one on the other line. Claudia, who loves reading mystery books, is determined it's the Phantom Caller who is a jewel thief operating in Stoneybrook. In my need to reread my way through my childhood, I of course had to continue with Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls (The Baby-Sitters Club, #2) by Ann M. Martin. Let me begin by saying I liked it a lot better than Kristy's Great Idea (The Baby-Sitters Club, #1) because it had a little mystery associated with it. It did have a happy ending when they found out the prank calls were done by none other than Alan Gray. He had a crush on Kristy and wanted to ask her out to the Halloween Hop but didn't have the nerve to do so. Many people think that...

Kristy Thomas is a seventh grade student at Stoneybrook Middle School. She babysits in the afternoons after school and on the weekends. After Kristy witnesses her mother make several phone calls to find a babysitter for David Michael, she comes up with a great idea. What if parents could call one phone number and reach several babysitters at once? Excited by her plan, she recruits her friends Mary Anne Spier and Claudia Kishi and newcomer Stacey McGill to help her start The Baby-Sitters Club . Follow their adventures as they get prank phone calls, parents who lie, and more. What can I say about Kristy's Great Idea (The Baby-sitters Club, #1) by Ann M. Martin? When I discovered this series as a child shortly after discovering the Sweet Valley Twins series, I was intrigued by the basis of the story and was excited to read the first book. I enjoyed it so much that I desperately wanted to start my own babysitting club but that wasn't in the cards for me. As an adult, I wa...