Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers
June 7, 2021
Poet Crawford (Reversible) and fiction writer Milks (Kill Marguerite and Other Stories) collect heartwarming reflections on the influence of Ann M. Martin’s famed Babysitters Club series in this reverent anthology. As they write, “We are all the legacy of these books, which taught us to see young people’s lives as serious business,” and the essays and art on offer consider the books’ messages about friendship, work, family, race, gender, and sexuality. In “Fun with Role-Play,” Kristen Arnett reflects on how the series allowed her to escape her reality as a queer child in an ultrareligious home. Artist Yumi Sakugawa contributes an astonishing graphic essay about her love of Claudia Kishi, an Asian American series character, and in “Scripts of Girlhood: Handwriting and the Baby-Sitters Club,” Kelly Blewett investigates how the handwriting of each club member tells a story of gender performance. While the anthology is deeply nostalgic, each piece does a fine job of balancing tenderness with critique: “Getting Over Claudia and Calories,” for example, sees Jennifer Epperson describing how the series’ obsession with thinness affected her relationship with her body. Sentimental but never cloying, this anthology will hit home for readers who grew up with the series.
July 1, 2021
Crawford and Milks gather essays on Ann M. Martin's beloved Baby-Sitters Club series about a group of tween best friends and babysitters (published from 1986-2000) that ruminate on how the books have delighted and disappointed us. Between Kristen Arnett's opening essay about acting out the books, and her own life, through her Barbie dolls, and Chant� Griffin's closing piece about sole Black BSC member Jessi's burden to explain and understand herself in relation to the series' white default world, are varied contributions that go deep into the series' treatment of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and much more. In one of three comics contributions, Yuma Sakugawa recalls the bliss of finding a Japanese American role-model character in cool Claudia. Myriam Gurba's essay views the club's entrepreneurialism in light of her Chicana upbringing and the high-school economics classes she now teaches. Overall underscoring how we read the series, both to follow our dear friend-characters and to learn about ourselves, this gift to and from the BSC fan universe will inspire many admirers to remember, revisit, and reexamine.
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