This just in: Logan likes Mary Anne!
Netflix is set to release its new series based on The Baby-Sitters Club books, which were everywhere when I was growing up.
I used to work at a public library and have personally re-shelved just about every one of their books, including the one where they try to solve the mystery behind the ghost at Dawn’s house.
The idea for the series came from a 1985 book called “Ginny’s Babysitting Job.”
An editor at Scholastic, Jean Feiwel, noticed that this book that hadn’t been heavily promoted was still selling pretty well.
Sensing a trend in the making, Feiwel thought up the idea of a series of books about a group of babysitters for middle-grade readers, and found a writer and editor she’d worked with before to take it from there.
That writer was Ann M. Martin, who came up with the characters, their community of Stoneybrook, Connecticut and the adventures that one gets into when running a babysitting club.
It took off pretty quickly, to the point that Scholastic began releasing a new book every month.
There were 213 books in all, selling an estimated 180 million copies, and inspiring some young readers to start their own real-life clubs.
Martin has said she wasn’t intending to write a girl-power series, but that’s certainly how many readers saw it.
The babysitters were running their own business, after all, and relying on each other at least as much as, and usually more than, the adults in their lives.
And it was a diverse set of characters, at a time when the paperback shelves weren’t brimming with books about young women of color.
Now they’re back, with a lot of the original Baby-Sitters readers grown up and set to introduce their kids to the characters they were into when they were in school.
If you could use a little beauty in the world right now, check out the Instagram account of photographer Trung Huy Pham, who traveled to Vietnam to document the annual water lily harvest there.
The bright, colorful flowers and their long green stems seem to sway in the water as they’re harvested from the flooded rice fields.
Did I mention some of these were taken by drone?
Over 30 years ago, The Baby-Sitters Club made space for girls from all backgrounds (AV Club)
‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Trailer: An Iconic Piece of ’90s Nostalgia Heads to Netflix (Indiewire)
Vivid Photographs by Trung Huy Pham Capture Annual Water Lily Harvest in Vietnam (Colossal)
Kristy’s second great idea was to become a Cool Weird Awesome backer on Patreon
Baby Sitters Club books photo by Jamie via Flickr/Creative Commons
