Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss

Author:Gabrielle Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Almost all of us can identify if we’re a Kristy, Claudia, Mary Ann, Stacey, Dawn, Jessi, or Mallory, and almost all of us made at least one failed attempt to start a babysitters club in our youth (turns out no one actually wanted a 12-year-old babysitter, plus someone always ended up skimming funds to buy Choco Tacos). But in seriousness, the stories of Kristy and company subconsciously shaped how a generation of girls conceived of our careers and ourselves. In an era of ambition-free, endlessly wealthy teen protagonists, the Baby-Sitters weren’t just girls waiting for neighbors to dial them up for a gig; they actively organized and sought out opportunities. BSC wasn’t singularly responsible for the career ambitions of Millennial women, nor is the series without flaws—obviously, the characters had the privilege to follow their professional bliss because they all came from well-off families. But ultimately, the series offered a fun, positive way of thinking about careers that few readers were exposed to at home, teaching us that with friends and just one really, really great idea, girls could make something meaningful.

Babysitting success begets babysitting imitators, including series that tried to fuse the BSC concept with other trends. Cherie Bennett’s Sunset Island might have been the most successful of these hybrids; the series lasted for 33 volumes published between 1991 and 1997 simply by daring to imagine what would happen if the Baby-Sitters were also the Wakefield twins? We find the answer on the made-up rich person vacation area of Sunset Island, Maine, where Emma (the rich one), Carrie (the nerdy one) and Sam (the boy-crazy one), dwell in a semi-eternal summer. The girls work as au pairs, chase dudes, and engage in Saved by the Bell–style hijinks, like starting a band that gets signed to the record label owned by the father of a girl who hates you, competing in a beauty pageant against some other girls who hate you, and flashing forward ten years into the future for one volume in the middle of the series’ run when the well of plot ideas runs dry. Cherie Bennett was a grand master of ’90s teen job novels. She covered teen interns on an exploitative and incredibly popular TV talk show in Trash in 1997 and teens who want to become doctors in University Hospital in 1999, among others, always leaving readers with the most important business lesson of all: work is a great place to meet boys!

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