Like many folks, including the crew over at Jezebel, who have a bunch of suggestion for revitalizing the fondly-remembered megaseries, I'm excited about the impending resurrection of the Baby-Sitters Club. As a little girl, they were the second franchise series I was really into, the first being the fantastically bland World of Barbie novels (Barbie spends a summer interning at a fashion company in the Bay areas! As a model in New York! Meets a guy with whom she has a summer romance, but of course she and Ken are kind of on break so it's not, you know sketchy or anything). The members of the Baby-Sitters Club were far more accessible, of course. They had strict parents, and divorced parents, and diabetes, and exceedingly chaste boyfriends, and big families that they felt a little bit lost in. They were younger than Barbie was, and while some of them were pretty, they weren't out of reach, in part because they were so young, a few years away from the point when the gap between truly bodacious girls and the rest of us opens up. They were an oasis between childhood and true teendom, and easy to like as a result.
But I've been thinking a lot about the books I read when I was young recently, both for this piece I did about Twilight and for a couple of other reasons. And I have to admit that as I've pulled together the lists of books that influenced me and stuck with me longest, it didn't even occur for me to put any of the Baby-Sitters Club books on any of those lists. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like there isn't other genial trash on there, like Star Wars extended universe novels.
I think it's possible that the Baby-Sitters Club characters were actually too well-engineered to be truly memorable. Each of the girls really functions like an aspect of a single personality, rather than a full human being. It's easy to find one of them to relate to, at least for however long it takes to polish one of the novels enough. But none of them are quite pungent enough to stick with you. A real heroine has to be at least slightly unlikeable some of the time, whether it's Lizzy Bennet smacking down Mr. Darcy mistakenly, Jo ruining her chance of happiness with Laurie, Maud Bailey pinning up her hair and being cold to Roland Michell because she's been so badly hurt in the past. I have a hard time recognizing myself in any character without a serious and obvious flaw, and without any effort to overcome it, and it's been that way as long as I could remember. You can have diverting trash with those kinds of characters in it.