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The Baby-Sitters Club Graphix #4: Claudia And Mean Janine (2013)

by Raina Telgemeier(Favorite Author)

4.31 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Graphic Novels & Comics

publisher

Graphix

series

Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

review 1: I’m a fan of Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novels, and I loved the Baby-Sitters Club novels in junior high. I think Raina is a great choice for adapting these stories into a graphic series because her playful, cartoony style is appealing to young readers, and I suspect she’s a fan. (A BSC book made a cameo in her graphic memoir Smile.)This fourth graphic novel adapts the seventh original novel, and is from almost-eighth-grader Claudia’s perspective. It shows her struggle to be accepted for herself, and the complex relationships going on in her family, most notably between Claudia, her maternal grandmother (Mimi), and her super-smart sister (Janine). When Mimi suffers a stroke, the entire family has to make adjustments in their routines to help her recover. This i... mores an interesting look at how assumptions and conclusions can be wrong, and the importance of communicating. The rest of the BSC girls, now including Dawn, are running a thrice-weekly play summer play group for the neighborhood children. A couple of kids are proving to be especially problematic.There is a lot to relate to in this series. The girls are well-adjusted tweens living in a middle-class Connecticut neighborhood. They struggle with typical issues such as divorce, sibling rivalry, keeping secrets, and gaining the trust and respect of their parents. Telgemeier’s illustrations are simple, but effective. Not a single frame is wasted, and she uses fun little tricks to imply things. She captures the girls’ personalities well—Kristy is a tomboy who lives in hoodies, jeans, and sneakers, Maryanne’s overprotective father doesn’t accept her growing up and keeps her in braids and knee socks, Claudia is artsy with eclectic fashion tastes, and Stacey is oh-so-sophisticated with her New York fashion sense.Only a couple of things disappointed me with this adaptation. The big one is that the time period isn’t explicit. These books began in the 1980s, and without that firm setting, a lot of things won’t make sense to modern readers coming to the series for the first time. A cell phone was oddly mentioned in the previous book, and Janine mentions learning HTML and creating websites, but these feel anachronistic, and really just confuse things. As seventh graders, the girls are still considered way too young for makeup. They take their babysitting charges outside and on walks. Instead of social media and the internet, they have to make copies of fliers and put an ad in the newspaper. While all of this certainly echoes my own junior high life in 1980s Virginia, it will baffle today’s seventh graders, since there aren’t any clues that they’re not reading a present-day setting, and there have actually been subtle attempts to modernize it.Secondly, I wish it had been full color. Telgemeier’s color graphic novels are beautiful, and I definitely missed it, most notably with the appearances of the girls. Kristy’s hair is brown, but she looks blonde in black and white. The physical characteristics of Claudia’s Japanese ethnicity are also lost, as she has the same skin tone as her Caucasian friends, and Telgemeier’s style doesn’t allow for Claudia’s almond-shaped eyes. Claudia’s ethnicity is a defining feature for her in the original novels, but it factors in here only as a last name.In all, I think this is a good adaptation of the novel that will please older readers looking for a fun flashback, as well as younger readers approaching the series for the first time.The series is safe for all ages, but is targeted toward female readers between 5th and 9th grade.
review 2: a graphic novel version of the book by the same name. cute, if not all that memorable. maybe i was distracted because i read it at the laundromat & i kept getting up to see if the wash cycle was finished. as an aside, i was poking around on youtube last night, & i found a series of videos that act out these graphic novels using american girl dolls. the credits to the videos say that they are based specifically on the graphic novels, & they also mention that the graphic novels are based on the original series by ann m. martin, but it was definitely a little unsettling to contend with the reality that young girls today might be discovering the babysitters club through something other than the original babysitters club books. & that they then might be acting out the books using stop-motion technology & their vast collections of american girl dolls. it all made me feel about a thousand years old. less

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