Book Review: Claudia and the New Girl

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Claudia and the New Girl (Baby-Sitters Club #12)

Author: Ann M. Martin

Date: 1989

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-43721-6

Length: 142 pages

Quote: "She's just moved to Stoneybrook and will be joining us for English. I hope you'll make her feel at home."

Yes, but...with their schoolwork, families, hobbies, approved after-school activities, baby-sitting, and club meeting, the Baby-Sitters Club don't really have a lot of time to be real friends to anyone else. Even the boyfriends, Kristy's Bart and Mary Anne's Logan, see the Baby-Sitters outside of school mostly when they're baby-sitting. It's not that they mean to be a clique, although Kristy and Mary Anne, the baby-faces of their class, and Claudia and Stacey, the fashion plates, were best friends to each other even before Dawn became Mary Anne's stepsister.. (In these early volumes, Jessi and Mallory, also best friends to each other, aren't yet old enough to be Baby-Sitters.) They're certainly not one of those "popular cliques" that are all about "We're 'In' and you're 'Out'," which are so much fun to bust up. In short, the other Baby-Sitters don't mind Claudia and Ashley, the new girl, having art in common and working on their paintings together, as long as Claudia saves time for the club meetings and the actual baby-sitting that take up most of their after-school time.

Trouble is, Ashley is the sort of girl who wants a kind of exclusive devotion from her best friend that's not compatible with belonging to a club and hanging out regularly with four longer-term friends. Ashley is not a baby-sitter and she seems to resent Claudia's being one.

Most middle school girls don't actually have to choose between an exclusive friendship and a club. Those who do would probably be happier with a solution that allowed them to have both. Claudia's problem is, like several of the problems the Baby-Sitters face in their ultra-nice lives, the sort of problems many readers only wish they'd ever had; her solution is not the one that sounds happiest, and some readers won't like Claudia or this book at all.

As an adult I read it as just another Baby-Sitters Club story, where an extremely nice girl solves a personal problem and learns something about baby-sitting, but I don't rate this installment as high as some of the other books in the popular series. Writing this review, I'm asking myself why not. I know a few girls like Ashley do exist (and no, most of them don't grow up lesbians, although some of them are lesbians-until-graduation in college). I agree with Martin that these clingy, needy girls have emotional problems and are likely to be attracted to undesirable teen behaviors, drugs and sex and even bullying, all the way to the violent insanity in The BasicEight; the girl who does have to choose between one of them and other, older, healthier friends should probably choose the other friends, or friend. I suspect this story was really about a high school girl with a possessive boyfriend, "translated" to an earlier stage of life to keep it in the Baby-Sitters Club books' target market. People cut back on social clubs and hobbies when they get married and become parents. Anyone whose craving for an exclusive friendship demands that his or her friend drop other friends and activities when the person making the demand can't even offer marriage can reasonably be considered an undesirable friend, but Ashley's craving that kind of commitment from another girl makes her sound like a real creep, an alien who shouldn't be able to breathe the atmosphere on Planet Nice where the Baby-Sitters dwell.

Still...I remember a different type of social scenario, probably more common, from my first year at college. I didn't know anybody and some other freshmen, nice girls straight out of a church prep school, tried to take me under their wing. I tried to like them but...I mean, really...their idea of "being nice to the poor little public-school kid who doesn't know anybody yet" involved spending a whole afternoon reading their twelfth grade school yearbooks at me. They did not feel obligated to try anything more interesting, like going out for a walk, much less doing any urban mission work. They were just lumps of flab. And then there was the rock star, a real live local vocalist who'd taken LSD and had a bad enough trip that she'd decided to try to be a Christian singer and go to a Christian school instead. She'd had very little practice being a serious Christian and wasn't really good at it, but wow, a rock star was actually bored and lonely enough to enjoy my company! We wrote songs and stories and went for walks and double-dated. She was the most talented actress I've ever seen, the star of a particularly difficult modern play. I really enjoyed hanging out with her whenever I was invited to do so. And I wasn't a clinger, nor was she. Both of us thought of other people who were interested in the same things we were doing as, in the famous words, "Here is one who may increase our joy." 

Nevertheless, it looked to some older people as if a less-than-ideal friend might be cutting me off from a whole group of, well, safer friends...Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, a real friendship was protecting me from feeling bad about a lot of casual acquaintanceships that weren't friendship and never would be. The actress and I did indeed find other people, mostly boys of course, but not only boys, who did increase our joy--people who went for walks, and read and wrote poetry, and sang, and acted, and worked at the mission. Those friendships made it much easier not to resent the lumps.

A story like that wouldn't fit into the Baby-Sitters Club series. The Baby-Sitters aren't bores, although they are children. On their own level of life experience they're a diverse group of friends who, rare among young girls, don't try to act like a clone but appreciate each other's different looks and interests; and when new acquaintances happen to be baby-sitters, like Shannon and Abby, they do react with "Here is one who may increase our joy." It looks on the surface of this story as if the Baby-Sitters might be the sort of no-talent conformist clique that girls have to reject if they want to cultivate or use their own talents, the sort of clique that does as much to keep women underachieving and being depressed as the "old boys' clubs" do and sometimes more, like those lumps at the church college. They're not. They support Claudia's art; if Ashley respected Claudia's baby-sitting commitments the Baby-Sitters would respect Ashley's art too.

But somewhere there really ought to be a novel for middle school readers that celebrates the other kind of scenario, where the outsider really does rescue the talented artist from the crowd of stifling conformist bores who are wasting the artist's time and energy. Ashley may be a little too eager to be "mentor" to a kid her own age, but groups aren't always as nice as the Baby-Sitters Club, and those who reject a group and encourage a talented artist to ignore the group are sometimes the best friends the artist could ever hope to meet.

I wish somebody had written a novel around the theme, "If one friend seems to be pulling you away from a group of other people who think that person is weird, and that person shares your interests, then telling that group that you're weird too and moving away from them is probably a good thing...unless the group is a true affinity group and absolutely not a clique, like the Baby-Sitters Club."

As with all BSC books, this one is widely distributed enough that you can find it cheaper, but if you buy it here it's a Fair Trade Book. From the $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Martin or a charity of her choice. One $5 package could include up to 8 regular BSC novels (possibly more if your order includes "Little Sister" spin-offs, which are thinner), for a total purchase price of $45 or $46, from which Martin or her charity would get $8. You can also order dolls dressed to match the characters on the cover, for an online price of $10 per doll; this brings the total price for one book-and-doll to $20 (two books-and-dolls shipped together, $35; four, $65), and in that case we'd send $2 to Martin or her charity.