BSC Friends Forever

Friends Forever was the updated version of the Baby-Sitters Club. It had the same characters (the core four of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia and Stacey) with less baby-sitting and more modern notations (the characters have cellphones and email). I guess the publishers wanted to keep the familiar characters yet tweak them and take them in a more mature direction; thank GOD there are very few baby-sitting chapters, because those got so tedious and annoying. The girls actually act like thirteen year olds really do, which is ironically the drawback of this series--they are STILL thirteen and in eighth grade. I think this series would have been more satisfying if they had started off as freshmen in high school. It just makes NO SENSE to repeatedly acknowledge things that happened earlier in the BSC series (in which they were eighth graders) and yet have them again start eighth grade.

The themes in this new series seem to fit so much more with a high school setting, which is why it's puzzling to me that they weren't in ninth grade. They've scaled back the baby-sitting club, so Kristy has to deal with not being a dictator; Claudia and Stacey have a huge fight over a boy; Mary Anne breaks up with Logan and tries to strike out as a new, independent girl. Old friends like Mallory and Jessi are really only mentioned in passing, which would fit with high school, since they are two grades behind the other girls. From personal experience, high school is the place where old friendships either end or are re-formed, as new people come into play.

Did the publishers think that the girls who are reading about eight graders wouldn't buy books about freshmen in high school? I kind of doubt that would happen. In fact, I would say that the reason Friends Forever was unsuccessful was because there was no progression in the time line. The fact that these girls are perpetually thirteen begins to grate on the reader after a while. Plus, I think there really should be books about freshmen; it's a brand new, exciting, confusing time, and most books (and television shows) skip right over it to when the kids are older, like juniors or seniors.

Maybe this whole post is just telling me that I need to write a young adult series about freshmen. It's something to consider....