30 Important Books: No. 6, “Kristy’s Great Idea”

If you were not a girl in the late 80s, early 90s, that title will mean nothing to you.

If you were, then you know the Kristy of whom I speak is Kristy Thomas, softball player, tomboy, and baby-sitter extraordinaire. Also, founder of the BSC.

Yeah, that’s “Baby-sitters’ Club” to the unintiated.

Book No.1 in the BSC

These books were HUGE. I think the series eventually went to over 100 volumes, plus the “super specials” which were 100-200 pages and usually detailed awesome vacations or other cool things I wished desperately to do (go to California? Go on a cruise? Play Peter Pan? Take a winter ski trip? And let’s not forget about being stranded on a deserted island!). I read these voraciously, spending almost all of my allowance on these books and wishing very desperately to be cool enough to join the BSC. I did some baby-sitting in the neighborhood, and devised my own “Kid Kit”, just like the Baby-Sitters did, and even though I never got to do anything dramatic (Like Mary Ann does in Mary Ann saves the day!) or philanthropic (see Dawn and the Big Sleepover), they were helpful for my baby-sitting jobs.

No, they are not Great Works of Literature. And yes, the characters stayed the same age for approximately 20 years. But these truly got me hooked on buying books and devouring them so that I could read what was next. These girls were fun, and even though I doubt an 11 year old would ever dance Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, like Jessie does in Jessie and the Dance School Phantom, it was still fun to imagine. And these books tackled subjects like racism, kids with autism, ASL and Deaf kids, and other “heavy subjects” like divorce and diabetes long before other books were doing that. (As such, when I first heard about autism on the news, I thought, like Susan in Book #32?!?!?)

As you can see, these books made a big impact on me, and on a lot of other girls I knew. For awhile they were like Harry Potter among the girls I went to school with and played with in the neighborhood. We not only read the books, but we watched the TV series, saw the movie, and had the calendar. And there were dolls! Major marketing was happening here, tapping into the power of “tweens” before the term was even coined.

Any book that instills the love of reading in kids is great, and when it’s a series, even better. Kristy, Claudia, Stacy, MaryAnn, Dawn, Mallory, Jessie, Logan, and Shannon were the characters for me.