AWRW Way Back Wednesday Book Review: The Babysitter’s Club Series, by Ann M. Martin

Welcome to another Way Back Wednesday Book Review! This week, I am featuring the classic series The Babysitter’s Club!

Way Back Wednesday is a Book Meme created by A Well Read Woman with the aim to write mini book reviews on books read in the past, that left a lasting impression.

You know what kind of books I am talking about… The ones that you have read multiple times, and they still bring you nostalgia. Books like these are the reason you enjoy reading.

So grab that old-dusty-yet-loved-book off the shelf, glance it over, write a mini review, and join in with me on Wednesdays! EVERYONE is welcome to participate.

RULES:

1.) Discuss a book you read in the past that left an impression on you. You can write a condensed review if you prefer.

2.) Tag your post as “Way Back Wednesday” and include the button above.

3.) Link back to my blog, and this page.

4.) Include instructions, (copy & paste everything above), for others to participate. 🙂

“Four friends and babysitting -what could be more fun?”

The series is about a group of middle school students living in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. They run a business called “The Baby-Sitters Club” that helps parents find babysitters from the club who are available for jobs by calling during their club meetings. The club starts out with four members: Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill; it eventually expands to ten. When the club was founded, the four members were in the seventh grade, but ten novels later, they are promoted to the eighth grade. From there, they are frozen in time until the very end of the series, in which they graduate from middle school. A notable facet of the series is that each novel contains at least one subplot dealing with different issues the girls face. —Wikipedia

Genre: Middle Grade

Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks

Website

Goodreads

The girls’ friendship is at the heart of each novel, as well as the club itself and the girls’ entrepreneur skills. There was always an important life lesson to be learned from these stories. I loved the concept of this novel, and while reading I wished these girls were my real friends.

There are a whopping 200+ novels in this wildly successful series, and Author Ann Martin wrote approximately 80 of these. Originally, this was planned as a 4 book series, but an editor for Scholastic kept asking for more! There were also several spin-offs of The Babysitter’s Club, which included TBSC Mysteries, TBSC Super Mysteries, TBSC Super Specials, TBSC Little Sister, TBSC Little Sister Super Specials, TBSC Friends Forever, TBSC Portrait Collection, and lastly TBSC Graphic Novel Adaptations! The complete list of The Babysitter’s Club novels can be found here.

Thank you for joining me on this little trip down memory lane, and I hope you will revisit next Wednesday when I feature the Choose Your Own Adventure novels, which feature the rare second person POV!