SCREAM!

OK, so maybe this is how other people felt when the New Kids got back together? I can hardly believe this is going to be real.

The Summer Before (Babysitters Club)
Ann M. Martin
April 1, 2010

"Before there was the Baby-Sitters Club, there were four girls named Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. As they start the summer before seventh grade (also before they start the BSC), each of them is on the cusp of a big change. Kristy is still hung up on hoping that her father will return to her family. Mary Anne has to prove to her father that she's no longer a little girl who needs hundreds of rules. Claudia is navigating her first major crush on a boy. And Stacey is leaving her entire New York City life behind...

...in order to find new friends in Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

The Summer Before . . . is a sweet, moving novel about four girls on the edge of something big - not just the Club that will change their lives, but also all the joys and tribulations of being twelve and thirteen."

I never, ever though Ann M. Martin would write more about The Babysitters Club. And honestly, I would be a million trillion times more interested in a new book about the babysitters at 16, or 22--but that wouldn't get a "new generation reading the books we loved as girls", which I assume is the aim here.

Also, I only really started to sort of love The Babysitters Club as an adult, for sheer camp value, except for a few select titles that are really kind of awesome (Kristy's Big Day, Boy-Crazy Stacey). I've read far more of them recently than I did as a kid; I originally abandoned them when I was about eleven and couldn't take the ridiculousness anymore.

But. Still. WHAT THE WHAT? Next thing you're going to be telling me that Leonardo DiCaprio is going to be rejoining the cast of Growing Pains for a Very Special Episode.

(sorry about the Amazon link, it was all I could find, and that actually makes me wonder if this isn't some kind of very clever prank put together by female MIT students.)