Stacey quits the club, but suddenly realizes that her new "friends" are using her as a cover for their drinking, shoplifting, and other ideas of summer fun.
Ann Matthews Martin was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. After graduating from Smith College, Ann became a teacher and then an editor of children's books. She's now a full-time writer.
Ann gets the ideas for her books from many different places. Some are based on personal experiences, while others are based on childhood memories and feelings. Many are written about contemporary problems or events. All of Ann's characters, even the members of the Baby-sitters Club, are made up. But many of her characters are based on real people. Sometimes Ann names her characters after people she knows, and other times she simply chooses names that she likes.
Ann has always enjoyed writing. Even before she was old enough to write, she would dictate stories to her mother to write down for her. Some of her favorite authors at that time were Lewis Carroll, P. L. Travers, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, and Roald Dahl. They inspired her to become a writer herself.
Since ending the BSC series in 2000, Ann’s writing has concentrated on single novels, many of which are set in the 1960s.
After living in New York City for many years, Ann moved to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where she now lives with her dog, Sadie, and her cats, Gussie, Willy and Woody. Her hobbies are reading, sewing, and needlework. Her favorite thing to do is to make clothes for children.
this book that may as well be one of the special edition: readers request books (seriously, this book is IDENTICAL to Logan Bruno, Boy Baby-Sitter) by ghostwriter Peter Lerangis, stacey has fallen in with a bad crowd. first they come over to her house every day, make a mess, and eat all of her food without asking. when she gets a job at the day care at bellair's (the department store her mom works at), her friends hang out at the store every day. gradually stacey starts to realize her friends are shoplifting, and at one point they even use her to scam the store (using stacey's employee discount, they buy expensive items that they subsequently return for full price). stacey is terrified of telling robert because he already quit organized sports for her (see Stacey and the Cheerleaders) and is terrified of telling off her friends because she doesn't have any other friends (see Stacey vs. the BSC). honestly, writing it up here it sounds like an abusive relationship and I'm more sympathetic towards stacey than I was when I was reading it (see lowlights). anyway, the whole drama comes to a head at popular band u4me's concert where stacey's friends have smuggled in wine. they get in trouble, and stacey gets in trouble along with them and is really mad about it. meanwhile dawn's cousin comes to stay with the spier/schafer/porter clan for three weeks while her parents are in europe and is miserable the whole time. she tries to get to a train to find her parents but ends up at bellair's, where stacey saves the day and gets her back to dawn and mary anne. in the end, stacey rejoins the bsc.
highlights: -stacey calls her parents' divorce "the big chill." so it's when your college friend commits suicide and you all go back and reminisce and listen to a bunch of smokey robinson? and when jeff goldblum creeps on everyone? -stacey's spot on description of kristy: "if she faces a problem, she solves it. if she faces no problem, she makes one, and then solves it." -this manner of conveying that claudia is japanese: "kishi, by the way, is a japanese name." THANK YOU. take heed, ghostwriters: you don't need to use the term "almond-eyed" to explain that someone is asian. -apparently mary anne's last name (spier) rhymes with cheer, not crier. I remember being BLOWN AWAY when I read this. -the most popular band in the world is u4me. I love their rendition of red, red wine -mia (one of stacey's jerk "friends") says stacey is "sooo middle class" -- LOL, this is so freakin' connecticut I can't even deal -hint towards the california diaries series: dawn is already vaguely mentioning missing california again, and sunny calls to say her mom has cancer. dude, if you haven't read california diaries, what are you waiting for? those books are so freakin' good. -the bad kids smuggle in wine. wine. they smuggle in wine. bad kids. WINE. goddamnit this is so wholesome!
lowlights/nitpicks: -since it's by peter lerangis who wrote Logan Bruno, Boy Baby-Sitter, it's like REALLY? you wanted to rewrite the book but with girls? -stacey is so unbelievably naive. obviously she's getting played. when they all buy expensive things with her discount and then return them for full price. what a tool! I just don't buy stacey being that dumb. -apparently u4me once had to cancel a weekend at madison square garden because skyllo (their lead singer) snuck away to go skiing. stacey's "friends" think this is so cool, since it means they don't care what people think of them. but really it means THEY ARE SELF-CENTERED JERKS. -stacey ABSOLUTELY can't drink even the tiniest bit of wine because of her diabetes. really? the folks I've known with type 1 diabetes have been able to drink small amounts of alcohol without horribly messing up their glucose level. I think it's like fruit -- a ton of fruit isn't great, but some is fine. stacey eats things sweetened with fruit juice all the time, but a sip of wine would have made her visibly sick?
stacey outfits: -"Finally I settled on a midnight-blue-and-white striped hooded sweatshirt with a laced placket, and matching Spandex leggings." -"In my...right hand [was] a blue cotton button-down shirt and khakis. I put on the button-down shirt and khakis and ran downstairs before I could change my mind."
This is one of my FAVE BSC books, and I think it's mostly because we see a member of the BSC hanging out with other friends. Also those friends are hilariously bad. Like, I'm surprised they weren't regularly chewing bubble gum. Those friends take advantage of sweet, naïve Stacey, and end up sneaking airport bottles of wine to a concert in their slouch socks. (As an aside: what kind of music does U4Me make? Stacey's mom calls them grunge, and she observes some "heavy metal types" getting held up by security - but with a name like U4Me (and an album called U & Me 4 U4Me), plus with how ~hunky the lead singer is, I can't help but to picture a bubblegum pop act.) Quote: "On a hunkiness scale of 1 (bowser) to 10 (turbo-hunk) he rates about a 15." Lololololololol.
My biggest disappointment in this book is that Stacey never calls out the bad girls for their shitty attitudes. She never tells them off for getting her involved with the alcohol, or taking advantage of her and her job, or any of that. I feel like that would have been the best ending, Stacey showing her solidarity to her nerdy BSC friends by telling off the bitches. (And getting teased mercilessly for it, because you know it won't break Sheila or Jacqui's hearts to not have the baby-sitter as their friend any more.)
Also fun little tidbit: I have this book signed by ghost writer extraordinaire Peter Lerangis, who I met in Toronto at a 39 Clues book signing. He was the coolest dude, and totally tickled that we were there to meet him because of his work on the BSC series.
a pretty solid entry. i’m sad stacey’s new non bsc friends turned out to be little shits and i’m especially sad this drove her right back to the nightmare that is existing around kristy thomas.
it is summertime yet AGAIN in stoneybrook. i officially give up. the time warp has bested me. my brain is broken. anyway, stacey's new BFF, andi, is going to sleep-away camp or something & stacey is sad. but at least she has some back-up friends to distract her. sheila, jacqui, mia, & heather are part of stacey's new friend crew now that she's quit the babysitters club & started hanging around with her boyfriend robert's friends. jacqui, mia, & heather are all kind of punky or grungy, in the early 90s way. they dye green streaks in their hair or have pierced noses (at age 13?). they wear black lipstick & big flannel shirts. sheila is the only vaguely normal-looking one. she is on the cheerleading squad, but still hangs around with these weirdos.
the girls start inviting themselves over to stacey's house every morning after mrs. mcgill goes to work. stacey is pleased because she doesn't have much to do. she has way fewer babysitting jobs since she quit the BSC & robert has a summer job painting houses. (he is 13 years old. who the fuck hires 13-year-olds to paint houses? when i was 13, my dad made me paint our house & i threatened to call the feds & turn him in for child labor violations.) but within a few days, stacey notices that her friends come over, loaf around, eat all the food in the house, make messes, & are not all that considerate. mrs. mcgill is a little quicker on the uptake & says that if stacey is so bored, she should get a summer job. (again...stacey is 13. how is she going to get a LEGAL summer job?)
stacey calls around for an elder care position, a modeling gig, & some other stuff before she lands a job at the day care center at bellair's department store. you may recall that mrs. mcgill is a buyer for bellair's. nothing like a little nepotism to start your summer off on the right foot. stacey's job is to hang out in the day care area & entertain the children of shoppers. she is issued a regular paycheck & everything. i really don't see how this is legal, both from a child labor perspective & from a certified child care provider perspective. but if i belabor the point every time a babysitters club book is ridiculous & unrealistic, i won't have time to eat or sleep anymore.
stacey's new buddies show up after her first day at work & ask if she wants to hang out & shop. stacey loves to shop & so quickly agrees. but her friends start showing up every day after work. & they always just want to wander around bellair's & window shop. stacey is getting to know a lot of the clerks & stuff at the store, & whenever one of them stops stacey for some idle chitchat, the other girls wander off. one day, stacey sees a scarf in one of her friend's bags. she asks about it & the friend claims it's a gift for her aunt or something. the next day, she finds her friends looking at a paperback & shortly thereafter, she hears the clasp close on one of their bags. she begins to wonder if her friends are shoplifting from bellair's...but they wouldn't do that, would they?
the next day, the girls pressure stacey to let them use her employee discount. they all have to buy gifts for various relatives. stacey is uncomfortable with bending the rules (even though i have never known anyone who had access to an employee discount who did not share it with friends) but she finally relents. each of her friends buys something ridiculous & expensive with the discount.
the next day, one of the girls (they are kind of interchangeable to me...maybe it was sheila) confesses to stacey that they all returned their purchases for full price refunds...which means they each made money on the transaction. the thing is, it's only a 10% discount. so they'd have to buy a $100 item to make even $10, & i don't see random 13-year-olds in the early 90s having $100 laying around to convert into employee discount fraud. how much could they have really made from this little scam? enough to take stacey out to lunch, i guess. she is shocked by their duplicity...but swiftly forgets about it in light of the fact that the girls' favorite band, u4me, is playing an upcoming show in stamford, & tickets go on sale that afternoon. the girls bike over to the mini-mall after lunch to get in line for tickets. u4me is hugely popular & the line is really long. as it progresses, the girls start getting fidgety. each in turns tells stacey, "i'm going for a bike ride. here's my money. get me a ticket if i'm not back before you get to the window." so somehow stacey ends up waiting in line alone & getting tickets for all her friends.
she's a little bit miffed but again forgets about it because she's just so excited to go see u4me. mr.s mcgill agrees to drive them to the concert. another friend's parent is supposed to pick them up after. they make their way to their seats & each girl except for stacey swiftly produces a bottle of liquor she had stashed somewhere on her person (under a hat, sewn into a coat lining, down a sock). stacey is SHOCKED, i tell you, SHOCKED! she knows liquor is not allowed in the stadium. they ask if stacey wants a sip & she's all, "hell no! it's against the rules, & plus i would die from a diabetic reaction to the sugar!" then two of the girls start passing a cigarette back & forth. then one of them gets into an argument with another concert-goer. suddenly a security guard grabs stacey & she & all her friends are rounded up for questioning about sneaking in drinks. one of the girls has stashed her bottle in stacey's sweater. stacey denies that it's hers & even whips out her emergency injection kit to prove to the guards that she is diabetic & wouldn't be drinking, but she & the others are forced to leave anyway. security calls their parents, who are enraged. when mrs. mcgill shows up, stacey immediately denies drinking. mrs. mcgill says she knows stacey wasn't drinking, but she still made a mistake in hanging around with friends that would not only drink but then frame her for their own bad judgment. on the ride back to stoneybrook, mrs. mcgill points out all the ways that stacey's new friends have taken advantage of her--from eating up all the food in the house to leaving messes to using stacey's good girl looks to help them sneak alcohol into a concert. stacey contemplates telling her mom about the suspected shoplifting & employee discount returns, but doesn't. mrs. mcgill says she knows stacey wasn't drinking, but she grounds stacey for three days anyway to make a point about stacey's questionable taste in friends. she tells stacey to use the time to think about whether or not she wants to maintain those friendships.
stacey is far more rational than most 13-year-olds (including myself at that age) & decides not to be friends with those girls anymore. as soon as she is ungrounded, she calls robert & explains everything. he says he is on stacey's side & doesn't trust her ex-friends...but stacey is disappointed that he doesn't say he will no longer be friends with any of them. stacey then calls claudia & asks if there's any chance she could be re-admitted to the babysitters club. claudia invites her to a meeting to ask in person.
everyone at the meeting is nervous that stacey will just flake out on them again, but kristy finally accepts stacey back into the club on a probationary level. stacey thinks about how maybe the members of the babysitters club are not always as sophisticated & cool as she'd like them to be, but at least they are honest & trustworthy.
oh, also, B-plot: one of sharon's cousins is going on a "second honeymoon" to london & asks her to watch his six-year-old daughter for three weeks. his six-year-old daughter that sharon hasn't seen since she was a little baby. dawn & mary anne volunteer for the job, but the little girl is really homesick & sad & confused about being dumped off on strangers. she eventually tricks dawn & mary anne into playing hide & seek & runs away. her big plan is to find the train station & take a train to london to find her parents. she ends up in bellair's instead & bumps into stacey. stacey is vaguely aware of dawn & mary anne's sitting job because she keeps in touch with claudia & claudia had filled her in. so stacey realizes that dawn & mary anne must be panicking over their charge being missing. she calls them, they come to collect her, & they vouch for stacey's responsible behavior when she asks to rejoin the club.
I know it’s routine to have the “Fall in with Bad Crowd” storyline. I just thought this was kind of meh and hilarious. Stacey and her new friends get caught with booze and Stacey plays the Diabeetus card to cement her innocence. It just was funny. I am excited to continue the romantic saga of Stacey and Robert. Seriously, the dude has got to go.
A solid book with an interesting story. Stacey's new friends are bad girls who shoplift and lie. She's unsure if they're TRULY bad people or not, until they get drunk at a concert. Stacey is arrested, along with them.
While the basic premise is the same as Logan Bruno: Boy Baby-Sitter, where Logan gets involved with a gang called the Badd Boys, the two books go in different directions. Logan spends half of his book, trying to quit the gang. When Stacey realizes the girls are bad, she cuts them out of her life immediately. Go Stacey! (Although it would have been nice to have a scene where she tells off the bad girls.)
This book is a sequel to Book 83, where Stacey quits the Baby-Sitters Club. Sadly, the sequel material is limited to the final chapter. You could argue that it's a tacked-on resolution. Since Stacey's new friends didn't work out, she goes to a Baby-Sitters Club meeting and begs them to take her back. That's all. There's no real attempt to address the issues that caused Stacey to quit in the first place, namely, her obsession with Robert and the fact that she's disgusted at how immature the BSC members are. It's a shame that the character motivations weren't as well done here as they were in the breakup book.
I think this book should have removed the three-chapter baby-sitting subplot about Amy, and replaced it with Stacey working her way back into the club. That could have been better. The Amy subplot is highly irrelevant, and far too similar to the Alicia subplot in the previous book.
Stacey has quit the Babysitters Club. She’s no longer friends with the members of the club and prefers to hang out with her new friends and boyfriend. It’s summer and Stacey suddenly finds that she has more free time as she use to babysit on a weekly basis. She spends her time with her new friends, listening to their favourite band U4Me and munching on snacks. Stacey’s mum gets sick of Stacey and her friends making a mess of the house and eating all the food so she tells Stacey that she must get a summer job. So, Stacey gets a job working as a child minder for Bellair’s which is a department store.
Stacey is really good at her job thanks to all her babysitting experience. Her new friends meet her every day after work and they spend time at the mall. Stacey loves her new friends as they are into fashion and obsessed with U4Me too. However, Stacey discovers that her friends are into shoplifting and drinking alcohol. Stacey doesn’t know what to do, the girls are all thirteen years old and without them she would be all alone.
It was interesting reading this book where the Babysitters Club is at odds with each other. There have been fights in other books but that usually gets resolved by the end of the story. There was some lead up to Stacey leaving the group in previous books, where she is unhappy with babysitting all the time and wanting to do other things. The Babysitters Club involves a lot of dedication from its members. The girls have meetings three times a week and babysit on a weekly basis. That’s a lot work for thirteen year olds so I can understand why Stacey would want to quit. As a crusty old person, I feel that the whole issue could have easily been resolved if the girls had an honest chat instead of a screaming match. Stacey could have asked to do less babysitting or take some time off or leave the group but still remain friends with the other girls. However, I know without all that fuss there would be no story.
Obviously, the Babysitter girls reconcile with Stacey, she loses her bad girl friends and she rejoins the club. Stacey is one of the main characters of the Babysitters Club after all. I also get the feeling that Stacey could have been very happy without the Babysitters Club if she found the right friends too. While the girls reconcile, they don’t resolve the issues that caused Stacey to leave the club. Stacey just apologizes and tells them she’ll work her personal life around babysitting. I felt the other girls should have apologized as well for their part but they believe that only Stacey is wrong.
There is also a secondary plot in the novel about Mary Anne and Dawn who are babysitting their cousin Amy. Amy’s parents have gone to London for a holiday and leave Amy behind. The girls have so many fun plans for Amy but Amy spends her time crying because she misses her parents. One day, the girls play hide and seek with Amy and I wasn’t surprised that Amy used that time to run away. Fortunately, Stacey finds her while working at the department store and calls Mary Anne and Dawn. The event leads the way to Stacey rejoining the Babysitters Club.
I liked this book as it was interesting to see what would happen if one of the girls quit the club. I wish it had been a more positive book and that Stacey’s new friends weren’t bad girls but just different girls. There is also a spin off series that looks into life without the Babysitters Club called California Girls which features Dawn. Dawn hasn’t quit the Babysitters Club but she moves to California to live with her dad for a while. The focus of California Girls is less on babysitting and more on teenaged life. It also has a more mature feel than the Babysitters Club books.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Stacey and the Bad Girls aka the one where Central Park Stacey comes crawling back to the BSC after getting mixed up with some real teenagers. I’m so disappointed. I wanted the BSC to realise they’re a team and ask Stacey to rejoin and she graciously but reluctantly accepts. The way it really goes down is pathetic. Stacey’s like “Please take me back, obviously you run this town, I’m nothing if I can’t meticulously diarise every moment of my babysitting jobs and pool my money with you guys for incidental expenses such as my kid kit and the occasional pizza party”
Ah, a BSC book where something dumbass teenagers would do ACTUALLY HAPPENS! Granted that everyone I know who tried shoplifting and/or drinking didn't do it until ages 16-17 but, hey, I'll still take it! Though this was ultimately what returned Stacey to the baby-sitters more or less begging to be allowed back in, it was still one of the better later books. I remember being so scandalized as a kid haha. As an adult I just enjoyed actual proper teen themes!
I feel like Stacey has always been the bad girl of the club, and so I wasn't surprised at all with this plot line. But glad she always realizes her mistakes and works hard to make up for them.
I loved the BSC growing up, and have decided to re-read (or read for the first time) some of the books in the series. Which of the members are you most like? :)
I loved the BSC series when I was younger and even more glad that I held on to them all these years so my children would be able to enjoy them as well. I would recommend for tween girls.
I really enjoyed this one! I wish I had read it back in the day. Alcohol and shoplifting in a BSC book GASP! And apparently I’ve been saying Spier wrong for the last 30 years.
I am teaching creative writing to a 5th grader, and we are both mega BSC fans. I read this to find examples of how Ann (or whatever ghost writer?) builds tension. This came out in 1995 - by this point, I was already is high school and took myself too seriously to bother with the Stoneybrook crew anymore. Well...by this point, the BSC was dealing with more than Jamie Newton and the Pike kids. Stacey got kicked out of the club (which Stacey explains in the back story Chapter 2 - by book 87 the backstory includes allllll the things). It is the start of a hot summer. Stacey has a high school boyfriend, a job, and a new group of friends, but she misses the BSC girls and is constantly stressed about her friends’ behavior, which escalates from raiding Stacey’s pantry to shoplifting to...a couple other shitty things that happen before she ends up with almost getting in trouble with the police. This book has reignited my appetite for all things BSC. I am gonna hit up another thrift store this afternoon to rustle up some BSC - I’m a junkie for these books. I was in the BSC fan club in 4th grade, where I got stickers and a glossy newsletter from Ann M. Martin. I would happily rejoin.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
(LL) As much as I didn’t like the person the ghostwriter and Martin made Stacey for the last few books, I really liked this one. It is such an important lesson for kids to learn that sometimes people pretend to be you friend so they can use your for things. It’s not always that obvious, and it can be very difficult to break off that toxic “friendship.” It is super important for kids seeing that you don’t have to only have friends through your significant other and you can have your own friends and be an individual outside of the relationship. Therefore, it’s a good thing this is why Stacey came back to the BSC. She’s still with Robert, but she doesn’t need to hang out with his friends all the time.
As an aside: I doubt the security for concerts was as strictly enforced in the 1990s, but it still seems unlikely that those teenagers would have gotten all that alcohol into the concert.
After quitting the Baby-Sitters Club (Stacey vs. the BSC), Stacey made new "friends" that used her as a cover for drinking alcohol and shoplifting. Since she was no longer babysitting regularly, Stacey got a job at Bellair's department store in the in-store daycare center. Stacey's mother also worked at Bellair's, so I think she may have done some fast-talking to get Stacey her job as thirteen year-olds cannot be legally employed. Luckily, Stacey decided that she missed her real friends and being in the BSC, so she rejoined the club and quit the job at Bellair's. I thought this book was boring since the other BSC members were seldom mentioned. It was like reading a BSC book where Dawn is in California, hanging out with her friends in the We 🖤 Kids Club.
This book is...weird. I think it does a pretty good job showing ways peer pressure can work, but I wish it had done more to show the dangers Stacey would face if she'd tried to do anything other than staying at the concert with the friends she came with. She was literally trapped, but the "wholesomeness" of the series prevents any acknowledgment of predators or anything else like that. Also Amy's parents are awful, wtf the WRONG with them?? ALSO there are A LOT of Greek people in these books. Why do the "bad girls" make fun of someone's name just for being Greek?? ONE OF THEM has a Greek name!
As a kid my best friends sister had the whole BSC series on a book shelf in her room. I thought she was so grown up. And I envied this bookshelf. And would often poke my head into that room just to look at it. And when I read BSC, I felt like such a grown up. And while I might have still been a little too young to understand some of the issues dealt with in these books, I do appreciated that Ann M. Martin tackled age appropriate issues, some being deeper than others, but still important.
This is one of the only BSC books I clearly remember reading and owning from my childhood--this cover sticks out to me especially. Stacey books are (almost) always going to be a bit above the rest for me, and this one is exceptional. The ending wraps up a little too cleanly, but all of the messy trappings on the way there make this one of my favorites.
Stacey spends the summer with her new friends...but they turn out to be terrible. They are rude to her at her house, they shoplift, and they smuggle wine into a concert which results in them getting kicked out. Stacey determines what qualities she wants in a friend and ultimately goes back to the BSC.
When I was 10 I joined a readers club/group where we got a new book every week. I chose The babysitters club. The books are fantastic! So enjoyable. I loved getting the book every week. They are super quick reads and I was able to read it in one day. Highly recommend for young teenagers to read or even younger if they are able too read well.