The Baby-Sitters Club
| The Baby-Sitters Club: Songs for My Best Friends | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Soundtrack album by Various Artists | |
| Released | October 13, 1992 |
| Length | 40:56 |
| Label | Warner Bros. |
| Producer | Jeff Barry, Richard Goldsmith |
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
The Baby-Sitters Club (also known as BSC) is a series of novels written by Ann M. Martin and published by Scholastic between 1986 and 2000, that sold 176 million copies. Martin wrote the first 35 books in the series, but the subsequent novels were written by ghostwriters, such as Peter Lerangis and many uncredited others.
The BSC series is about a group of friends, girls between 11 and 13 years old, who live in the fictional, suburban town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. These friends run a local babysitting service called the "Baby-Sitters Club." The original four members were Kristy (founder and president), Mary Anne (secretary), Claudia, and Stacey, but the total number of BSC members varies throughout the series. The books are told in first-person narrative from the perspective of the character named in the title who will confront common problems such as illness, sibling rivalry, peer conflicts, jealousy, and parents' divorce and remarriage.
The idea for The Baby-Sitters Club series originated with Jean Feiwel, an editor at Scholastic who saw the popularity of a novel called Ginny's Babysitting Job and realized there was a market for novels about babysitting. She contacted Ann M. Martin, who took the general idea of a babysitter's club, and created the characters, plots, and settings for the series. It was initially planned as a four-book series, but after the first four novels were moderately successful, Scholastic ordered two more, followed by twelve more as the series grew in popularity. By the time the sixth novel was published, the first printing was up to 100,000 copies. When publishing ceased in 2000, there had been 213 novels published in the series. Of these, Martin estimates she herself wrote from 60 to 80 of the novels.
With the exception of Super Specials and Super Mysteries, the novels are written and narrated from one character's point of view. The novels generally follow this format:
Kristy is known for her great ideas as well as her bossiness and a big mouth that can occasionally get her in trouble. The idea for "The Baby-Sitters Club" came to Kristy when her mother was having trouble finding a babysitter for her younger brother David Michael. She felt sorry for David Michael, as well as her mother. In a "flash", as she calls it, Kristy had her "great idea" to form the Baby-Sitters Club. Kristy formed the club with herself, Claudia, her best friend Mary Anne, and Stacey as founding members. Kristy usually wears jeans and a T-shirt (in the winter, a turtleneck and, if needed, a sweater), sneakers, and sometimes a baseball cap with a collie on it, in memory of the family dog, Louie, who was put to sleep in Kristy and the Snobs. She loves sports, and coaches a softball team for small children called Kristy's Krushers, which includes many of the club's sitting charges. Kristy comes from a large family, composed of her mother, Elizabeth, her stepfather, Watson Brewer (her biological father walked out of her family when Kristy was six years old), her two older brothers, Charlie (17) and Sam (15), her younger brother, David Michael (7), her stepsister Karen (7), her stepbrother Andrew (5) her grandmother, Nannie, and her sister adopted from Vietnam, Emily Michelle (2). The family's pets include Shannon (a puppy), Boo-Boo (a cat), and two goldfish.
...
Wikipedia