Title: The Secret Life of Mary Anne Spier
Publisher: Scholastic
Date: 1997
ISBN: 0-590-05992-0
Length: 118 pages
Quote: “Do you mean that the things I
bought can wind up costing me more than I paid for them?”
(This review appeared first on Blogjob.)
Some other books that feature Christmas as a theme have appeared on this site as "Sunday Books." Should this one? Meh. It's about Christmas as a shopping season. Mary Anne Spier probably is a Christian but, under Scholastic's new coddle-those-phobics rules, she never really mentions it.
In Baby-Sitters Club regular novel
#114, Mary Anne, who is one of the older Baby-Sitters but the one
who's appealingly young for her age, feels very grown-up as she does
all her Christmas shopping with, for the first time, Daddy's credit
card. At thirteen, she's old enough to add up how much she's spending
and calculate how soon she'll be able to pay it. She has not,
however, been told about credit card charges, because Daddy naively
expected Mary Anne to understand spending what she can pay back in
cash to mean what she can pay back in cash that day.
So she learns...and
parents don't read enough about teenagers like Mary Anne to
anticipate what sort of trouble that leads Mary Anne into. Perhaps
teenagers themselves can. In relation to her smarter, richer, bolder,
more sophisticated, and prettier friends, Mary Anne defines herself
as responsible, ethical, honest, and competent. Begging, stealing, or
other things the mass media show other teenagers doing when they're
desperate for money, are not options for Mary Anne. But what about
sneaking out, lying about her age, and taking a job as one of Santa's
Elves at the mall?
Not only is that something a girl like Mary Anne would do, it's something that would
make a girl like Mary Anne feel so guilty that she's actively looking
for special ways to help other people...and sure enough, because it's
Christmas, Mary Anne finds a way to help an older, more desperate
teenager share some of the magic of Mary Anne's “wonderful
life.”(Did I spoil anything? I don't think so. BSC fans know Mary
Anne, and with this character the question's not whether she'll find
a way to do something nicer than nice, but how.)
The Secret Life of Mary Anne Spier
is a very nice,
family-friendly, light and frothy story about a very nice teenager
doing nice things. If you're in high school, wrap it in brown paper,
or in the dust jacket off a grimmer book...or get tough, brazenly
display this and other nice kid-friendly books, and tell people
you're sharing them with a child and/or a grandparent.
Adults don't have
to make excuses for appreciating a thoroughly nice and wholesome
story, although 118 pages of large type, including the obligatory
“handwriting” graphics and summary of each other Baby-Sitter's
curriculum vitae, won't amuse us for very long. Every adult should
only have the experience of discovering that when a teenager does
start withholding information or even lying about where s/he has
been, sneaking around, and displaying guilt about keeping secrets
from Mother and Daddy, it's because the kid has taken a completely
legal, stupid, low-paid job. For those who've not had the experience,
at least there's this cheerful little bubble of a novel.
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