The Baby-sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search
All right, so today we're taking a little journey to a place I like to call "Claudia-land." It's a magic place filled with misspelled words, fluorescent high-tops, and Nancy Drew books. I always have to laugh at Claudia's relationship with Nancy novels- in today's installment, Claudia tells us that her parents "don't approve of Nacy Drew because they think [she] should be reading "literature." Funny, my parents said pretty much the exact same thing about my obsession with the BSC. Grown-up Claudia would so have a blog about her adolescent Nancy Drew infatuation... Grown-up Claudia and I would totally be blog-ring buddies!
And here we are: Janine gets some big award for being a genius. Claudia feels dumb. Also, this is the first Claudia book since the one where Mimi died, so Claud is also feeling even more alienated from her family than usual. She goes snooping around in her parents' den and finds that they have like 12,000 baby photos of Janine and like, 8, of Claudia. And the few they do have are Claudia with Janine. This I can totally sympathize with. We have 57 bajillion photos of my brother and maybe 14 of me, most of which are primarily characterized by him looking like he is either about to drop me or wants to bite me. I feel ya there Claud. Claudia decides because of the baby photo thing and because she doesn't look like her parents that she must be adopted. She also finds a lockbox in her dad's desk (I totally thought he had a gun as a kid. What? That's what all my friends parents' had lockboxes for. I know, I know. My midwestern roots are showing) which she thinks must contain her adoption papers.
So as some of you might have figured out, I totally use the tag-lines from the book covers to title my posts. Here's where they drive me crazy- sometimes they are totally misleading! In this case, "no one understands!" because Claudia doesn't tell anyone! She only tells Stacey about her suspicions. Come on, jacket copywriter. These books take less than 90 minutes to read cover to cover. You'd think that you could at least make the tagline mildly apropos to the storyline. Good grief.
Anyway, so with Stacey's help, Claudia goes on a wild goose chase stretching from Stoneybrook to Wyoming, searching for her birth parents. She calls adoption agencies and people whose kids had birth announcements in the Stoneybrook News the week she was born. She tries to get into her dad's safe-deposit box at the bank and tries to finagle her medical records from her pediatrician.
Basically, she goes bat-shit crazy over all of this until her parents finally notice and make her spill the beans. They take her irrational ranting pretty well all things considered. I mean, they don't laugh at her... or hit her (not advocating it! Just saying it seems like a distinct possibility!) They then proceed to rationally explain away all her fears: She doesn't look just like either of them, but she bears a striking resemblance to a younger Mimi, she couldn't find her birth announcement in the Stoneybrook News because it was printed in the Stoneybrook Gazette instead, which went out of business 9 years ago, and they have no excuse for the lack of pictures of her except that they were crappy parents (my words, not theirs.) And the lockbox that contains neither Claudia's adoption papers nor a gun? $500 in cold hard cash. Boy, they're going to regret telling her about that when they need it in the middle of the night and find out she's blown it all on junk food and Nancy Drew emergencies.
In other news, Emily Michelle, Kristy's new adopted sister, is slow. So for some reason, Mrs. Brewer decides to hire Claudia (who is also slow) to tutor her. And what do you know? Claud works a miracle and Em gets accepted to pre-school. Yay!
Key takeaways: People, it's really crappy to not take any pictures of your second child, okay? Really crappy. Grown-up Claud would so be in therapy over this. Grown-up Claud and I have more in common than I ever would have thought...
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