Confidentially Yours #5: Brooke’s
Bad Luck. By Jo Whittemore. Harper. $6.99.
Roxbury Park Dog Club #5: A New
Leash on Life. By Daphne Maple. Harper. $6.99.
Roxbury Park Dog Club #6: A Bone
to Pick. By Daphne Maple. Harper. $6.99.
Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club novels, which have
sold a remarkable 175-million-plus copies through 35 books by Martin and many
more by other writers, have inspired a whole set of “preteen girls doing good
things and having occasional minor difficulties” novel groupings, including Confidentially Yours and Roxbury Park Dog Club. The four original
members of Martin’s club, when her series started in 1986, were Kristy, Mary
Anne, Claudia and Stacey. In today’s many sequences along the same lines, there
is little that differs from series to series except the names of the girls (and
an occasional boy) and the specific activities around which the four-person
groups’ interactions revolve. For example, Confidentially
Yours features Brooke, Heather, Vanessa and Tim; Roxbury Park Dog Club includes Taylor, Kim, Sasha and Brianna.
Multiculturalism and
multi-ethnicity are part and parcel of the new book groupings, and some of the
family circumstances are updated to reflect modern family groupings, but by and
large, the central issues of these book series are minor ones in which the
protagonists have to confront something troublesome (although small in the
grand scheme of things), figure out what to do about it, and as a result become
wiser and more tightly bound in friendship. Thus, Brooke’s Bad Luck is all about superstition. Brooke visits a
psychic who warns her about an upcoming run of bad luck, and the prediction
seems to come true because of a series of little things that Brooke blows out
of proportion, such as spilling food and playing soccer poorly. What connects
Brooke’s troubles with the overall theme of Confidentially
Yours is that the advice column that gives this series its title, and the
newspaper that she and her friends put out together, are competing in a contest
that Brooke fears they will lose because her luck has turned bad. So she
creates a good-luck charm to counter the bad luck, and sure enough, it works!
But anyone who remembers stories such as, say, Dumbo, will know that it is belief
in good-luck charms – and bad-luck predictions – that gives them their power,
and this is the lesson that Brooke has to learn in order to take charge of her
own life again and stop believing she is somehow “destined” to have things go poorly
for her. It even turns out that Brooke’s soccer troubles were engineered – by
another player, who is jealous of her – and Brooke gets to mend that particular
fence while conquering her worries about superstition. “The fear is in your head,”
Brooke concludes, and everything ends, expectedly, in upbeat fashion.
The two latest entries in
the Roxbury Park Dog Club series
follow a very similar story arc. A New
Leash on Life focuses mainly on Brianna, who came to the club late – she
was invited by the three other girls – and feels somewhat left out of the
trio’s close friendship. So she bonds more closely than ever with the dogs in
the club, which the girls started to help dogs whose owners had to work all day
and to raise money for the local animal shelter. In fact, Brianna (Bri) bonds
especially closely with one particular dog, an older shelter resident called
Lily, and ends up deciding that she would like to foster Lily – if she can get
her mother to agree to take the dog into their home. So the issues here involve
friendship among the girls, bonding both with humans and with dogs, and family
matters – in effect, increasing the size of a family by bringing a dog into it.
Eventually, things work out even better than Bri ever thought they would, as
she develops a new and closer bond with her mother as well as her friends, and
Lily does in fact get to join the family. So all is smiles as the book ends.
But there are frowns, of course, as the next one starts. A Bone to Pick focuses on Sasha: in all these series, different
books focus on different members of the central ensemble. Sasha feels she does
more work for the dog club than her friends do, and as a result she is starting
to harbor resentment toward them. The question is whether the friendship can
withstand this sort of thing, in which the girls find they just cannot
communicate effectively with each other. It gets so bad that even well-meant
comments are taken the wrong way: “Maybe she was trying to be nice, but it came
out like she was being condescending.” Clearly something has to give, and it
must not be the girls’ friendship or their commitment to the club. But matters
get to such a point that Sasha eventually finds it “impossible to be happy
about anything.” So then, of course, the girls realize it is “time to get our
priorities straight,” and everybody apologizes to everybody else, and the club
is restructured to be sure all duties are apportioned fairly, and happiness
abounds for everyone – until, of course, another small crisis gets blown out of
proportion. But that can wait for the next entry in the series. Fans of the preteen-focused
Roxbury Park Dog Club and Confidentially Yours sequences will just
be happy that things have, once again, turned out so well…until the inevitable
next time.
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