A review by hyattsarah
Abby's Book by Ann M. Martin, Jeanne Betancourt
1.0
Every time I think I’ve read all the babysitters club books, I find a new gem I haven’t read. Except this one wasn’t really a gem.
Abby marked the point around when the BSC jumped the shark, waltzing in with her personality traits summarized as being a twin, a dead dad, allergies, and... sports? Except Kristy already had sports so that one didn’t really count. And Mary Anne already has a dead mom, so there’s that. Abby. She’s funny? Or something.
Abby leads us through the most phoned in portrait collection book yet, maybe because I don’t really care about her, and maybe because allergies and parental death don’t lead to the same whimsical stories as, say, art or fashion.
In this book: Abby’s teacher makes no effort to tell Abby and her sister apart, tells her parents to color-code them (seriously), Abby’s parents AGREE (SERIOUSLY), Abby and her sister loathe color coding (shocking!) and her parents are like, “well, you’re twins, you can’t expect people to bother to learn to tell you apart or get to know you as individuals but maybe one of you could cut your hair or something.” They’re six. The girls don’t like this for a few paragraphs — completely warranted — and then they decide that the only way anyone will ever tell them apart isn’t by getting to know them or their faces, so Abby’s sister agrees to cut her hair. Thus begins another personality trait for Abby, who is now The Twin With Long Hair.
Then her dad gets killed in a car accident and her grandparents show up and tell her right there in the school office. Her mom falls into a depression and stops doing housework. They take a depressing, isolating vacation. The family falls apart.
Eventually, the book culminates in a move to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, home of the Babysitters Club. Because both Abby and Kristy’s personalities are sports! (and allergies for the former), they end up as neighbors. This means Abby’s widowed, single mother of two buys a house in a wealthy part of town (Kristy lives in a mansion with like a hundred other people, including a ghost living on a floor of their house that the family doesn’t even use, remember?)
Abby’s mother got “a promotion and a bonus” and buys an enormous five-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a living room, family room, den, and office, and hires an interior decorator to furnish the house in entirely new furniture. I want to understand a world where this is possible or even desirable. Because as much as I’d love an extreme home makeover of my own, I don’t really want to deal with a five bedroom monstrosity of a house for three people.
Abby’s depressed, widowed mom does though.
I suppose it’s possible this whole book is a well executed exploration into Abby’s tendency to procrastinate on her homework, a fact she mentions no less than once a chapter. The thrown together, rushed nature of the book would lend itself to “a thirteen year old threw this together a day before it was due.” It’s middle school though, so Abby earns an A- on this “autobiography assignment,” something that feels remarkably familiar to me where it doesn’t matter if your work is any good as long as the sentences are grammatically correct.
(Abby’s twin, Anna, describes her own autobiography in this book and honestly it sounds way better than Abby’s and maybe should have been published in its place, but Anna isn’t in the Babysitters Club so nobody cares about her).
Abby marked the point around when the BSC jumped the shark, waltzing in with her personality traits summarized as being a twin, a dead dad, allergies, and... sports? Except Kristy already had sports so that one didn’t really count. And Mary Anne already has a dead mom, so there’s that. Abby. She’s funny? Or something.
Abby leads us through the most phoned in portrait collection book yet, maybe because I don’t really care about her, and maybe because allergies and parental death don’t lead to the same whimsical stories as, say, art or fashion.
In this book: Abby’s teacher makes no effort to tell Abby and her sister apart, tells her parents to color-code them (seriously), Abby’s parents AGREE (SERIOUSLY), Abby and her sister loathe color coding (shocking!) and her parents are like, “well, you’re twins, you can’t expect people to bother to learn to tell you apart or get to know you as individuals but maybe one of you could cut your hair or something.” They’re six. The girls don’t like this for a few paragraphs — completely warranted — and then they decide that the only way anyone will ever tell them apart isn’t by getting to know them or their faces, so Abby’s sister agrees to cut her hair. Thus begins another personality trait for Abby, who is now The Twin With Long Hair.
Then her dad gets killed in a car accident and her grandparents show up and tell her right there in the school office. Her mom falls into a depression and stops doing housework. They take a depressing, isolating vacation. The family falls apart.
Eventually, the book culminates in a move to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, home of the Babysitters Club. Because both Abby and Kristy’s personalities are sports! (and allergies for the former), they end up as neighbors. This means Abby’s widowed, single mother of two buys a house in a wealthy part of town (Kristy lives in a mansion with like a hundred other people, including a ghost living on a floor of their house that the family doesn’t even use, remember?)
Abby’s mother got “a promotion and a bonus” and buys an enormous five-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a living room, family room, den, and office, and hires an interior decorator to furnish the house in entirely new furniture. I want to understand a world where this is possible or even desirable. Because as much as I’d love an extreme home makeover of my own, I don’t really want to deal with a five bedroom monstrosity of a house for three people.
Abby’s depressed, widowed mom does though.
I suppose it’s possible this whole book is a well executed exploration into Abby’s tendency to procrastinate on her homework, a fact she mentions no less than once a chapter. The thrown together, rushed nature of the book would lend itself to “a thirteen year old threw this together a day before it was due.” It’s middle school though, so Abby earns an A- on this “autobiography assignment,” something that feels remarkably familiar to me where it doesn’t matter if your work is any good as long as the sentences are grammatically correct.
(Abby’s twin, Anna, describes her own autobiography in this book and honestly it sounds way better than Abby’s and maybe should have been published in its place, but Anna isn’t in the Babysitters Club so nobody cares about her).