October 17, 2009
BSC #3, The Truth About Stacey: Actually, You Can Handle the Truth
The original cover is even cheesier
Summary: Stacey has diabetes. Her parents want to fix it. They can’t. Instead, they learn to listen to her and help her deal with it. Stacey also manages to patch up her friendship with her ex-best friend, Laine Cummings, by actually talking to her about her illness.
In club news, the stupidly named Baby-sitters Agency has moved into the BSC’s territory, poaching clients with their older sitters and later hours. Kristy comes up with some ideas to keep the BSC running and attract new sitters, some of which are successful and some of which are horribly bad. (Two words: sandwich boards.) The club adds two new members, but they skip their jobs, then reveal that they’re actually spies from the Baby-sitters Agency. Kristy cries. Twice. In the end, the BSC sitters win because the kids they sit for actually like them, they actually do their jobs, and the parents trust them. Happy ending!
Thoughts: Liz Lewis and Michelle Patterson, the two girls who form the Baby-sitters Agency, are actually savvy businesswomen. They recruit sitters, send them on jobs, and collect some of their income for themselves. Basically, they’re baby-sitter pimps. I’ll be they grow up to be CEOs. Or madams.
Kristy’s Svengali-like hold on the other BSC girls becomes more evident in this book. They’ll do almost anything she suggests, including wearing sandwich boards to school to advertise the club and try to attract new members. Her bossiness is starting to show, and soon it will be so out of control, readers will start to wonder how she still has friends.
This book marks the birth of the Kid-Kit, which is actually one of Kristy’s better ideas. It’s a collection of books, games, and activities the sitters can take on their jobs so the kids will have something different to play with. As they note, one of the best things about playing at a friend’s house is the ability to play with new toys, and with the Kid-Kits, the sitters are walking toy stores. Sometimes Kristy’s ingenuity makes up for her faults. Sometimes.
