Review: Karen's Surprise by Ann M Martin (Baby-Sitters Little Sister #13)

I confess. Despite being utterly obsessed with the Baby-Sitters Club series and its spin-offs in my pre-teen years, I do not remember this particular book at all. I also confess. I like to occasionally read books that are meant for children, especially the ones that remind me of my childhood. So when I found this one on the shelf at the library, I couldn't resist borrowing it for a few days.

It turns out this one is a fun read.

Thanksgiving is almost here Karen's class at Stoneybrook Academy is going to put on a play. For Karen, who loves to be the star at all times and for her bestie Nancy Dawes who wants to be an actress one day, this sounds ideal. However, things take a turn for the worse when Nancy is cast as a potato, and Karen as the turkey. For some reason, her teacher thinks it is a good idea to give very minor roles (which involve walking across a stage,) to the kids in the costumes that are going to be the most expensive and time consuming for their parents to create. With a little help from her stepsister Kristy, Karen is able not only to communicate the unfairness of this. And then Karen comes up with another plan to show people that she can be the real star of the show.

The second plot focuses on the difficulty experienced by Karen and her brother Andrew having to go between two different families and two very different households, and how the adults in their lives, whether they are parents or stepparents, can get things wrong, a recurrent theme in the series.

Overall, this one was a lot of fun. I liked Kristy and Karen's solution to the play, just as I enjoyed the number of times Karen and some of her friends managed to take down class bully Pamela Harding. (Who, despite everything, seems jealous of Karen.) Karen's surprise at the end of the play absolutely made me laugh, as did the telling off she received afterward.

A fun read with a couple of sad moments. I can see why the publisher chose to reprint this one thirty years later and it has a great blend of relevance and nostalgia. 

Recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more