Kristy And The Mother's Day Surprise (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
kristy books continue to not really be my favorites...though, as kristy books go, this one wasn't too objectionable. mother's day is approaching, & kristy & the other members of the babysitters club (save for half-orphan mary anne) are struggling to think of really good mother's day gifts. plus, kristy's mom & watson are acting really weird at home, gushing over the kids even when the kids are being obnoxious, asking what the kids would think of having another sibling around. kristy's mom denies being pregnant when sam asks her point-blank, but the kids don't know why she's asking about new siblings if she's not knocked up or planning to be. this stretches the limits of my credulity a little bit. surely these kids know about adoption? charlie is 17 years old. it can't be a brand-new foreign concept for him. although it's also a big question mark to me as to how watson & mrs. thomas manage to go through the adoption process without the kids catching on, & get assigned a child in less than a year. i guess doing an international adoption (from vietnam) ostensibly sped up the process, but......okay, here's another bone to pick with this plot. watson & mrs. thomas adopt emily michelle from vietnam. but as far as i am aware, vietnam stopped allowing americans to adopt vietnamese babies during the war. in fact, the united states had very strained diplomatic relations with vietnam until the mid-90s, & this book was published in the mid/late-80s. when saigon fell, it was accompanied by what some scholars of international adoption call "the last baby drop," before supplies of vietnamese babies to american families dried up amidst fears that the babies were not really orphans at all, but were actually children that were stolen from struggling vietnamese parents. much as is the situation with haitian adoptions post-earthquake.i don't claim to be an expert on any of this shit. just throw it on the teetering pile of inconsistencies that plague the babysitters club book series & back to your regularly-scheduled recap.okay, so, kristy has the bright idea to give the moms of stoneybrook a day off from parenting as a mother's day gift. she pitches it to the other sitters & they think it sounds great. claudia discovers that a carnival will be in town the day before mother's day when she sits for jamie newton. the sitters decide to issue special invitations to some of their best clients (including their own moms in situations where they have younger siblings) & recruit stacey to come down from new york city for the day & help with the project. they decide that each kid can do three things at the carnival, will bring a bag lunch that they will eat at the playground afterward, & that wind-down time at the pikes' will be provided, where kids can make mother's day cards. the babysitters will recruit the fathers to provide transportation & child care to very young siblings to young to go to the carnival. mr. pike volunteers to look after marnie barrett, a tragic child of divorce whose dad was mysteriously written out of the series after buddy went to a diner with him in book #5. all i remember is that his name was hamilton, or "ham" for short, which is the best nickname ever.of the 29 kids invited, 21 can make it, so each sitter is responsible for three kids. there is an amazingly lengthy passage in which the sitters try to create "groups" for each sitter to look after, complete with color-coded construction paper necklaces. there's also a weird part where they are brainstorming clients to include, & mary anne suggests jenny prezzioso, & kristy responds, "ew, ew, EW!" it's kind of nice to see kristy acting like a 13-year-old, with babysitting charges she dislikes, but that still seems like a really mean response to a prissy 4-year-old, you know?so, the mother's day surprise goes off with nary a hitch & it looks like the book is going to be really dull. but then when the thomas-brewer clan arrive back home at the mansion, watson & mrs. thomas drop their bomb: they're adopting a two-&-a-half-year-old little girl from vietnam & will be meeting her at the airport tomorrow. her name will be emily michelle, even though she's two & a fucking half & probably already has a vietnamese name that won't be a bitch & a half for her to pronounce. gotta love transracial adbuction, amirite? everyone is psyched, except for andrew, who is worried about losing baby of the family status. kristy steps in to parent in mrs. thomas & watson's absence & makes him feel better. the next day, the kids make a banner & cookies to welcome emily michelle home, & kristy weirdly invites over the BSC members. why don't any of the other kids have friends that want to meet the new sibling? emily michelle is asleep & misses their big welcome, but kristy waxes poetic on how her presence will knit the halves of their family together into one big happy blended family, la la la. ugh.
Kristy and the BSC plan a special Mother's Day event to give their regular clients the only thing they really want: time away from their kids. The BSC takes a big group of kids to the carnival and the park from 9-4 on Mother’s Day, assisted in transport and lunch-making by local dads. Most of the book concerns the planning for the event; there’s also some concern amongst club members about what to get for their moms. Kristy’s mother hints the entire book that the Thomas/Brewer clan is about to have a bundle of joy, but she denies that she’s pregnant. At the end, Kristy’s mom and Watson announce that they’ve just been selected to be adoptive parents of a two-year-old girl from Vietnam. Kristy’s Mother’s Day surprise is her new sister, Emily Michelle.This is a decent book of the low-key, the-BSC-plans-something-and-then-does-it variety. Various parts of the plan unfold, and there are minor snags along the way, but nothing that might be considered a traditional conflict. I actually like this kind of book. It’s a relaxing read, the kind of thing this series does reliably well.Lingering Questions: Why did Watson and Elizabeth wait until they were selected to spring the news on their kids that they’d have an adopted sibling? I get not wanting to tell until it’s final, but you’d think they’d want some time to prepare their kids, just in case not everyone was as thrilled and question-free as Kristy. How did they even keep it quiet? Wasn’t there correspondence from the adoption agency? Phone calls? A home visit? Didn’t the agency social workers want to meet the rest of the family and find out, you know, what they thought about the situation? Did Watson and Elizabeth accidentally-on-purpose send the riff-raff to friends’ houses so they could impress the agency with their giant clean house and pleasant family of two? Or, more likely, did they just buy a baby on the black market? Hey, Watson’s got deep pockets.Timing: Mother’s Day, obvs. So this would start in early to mid May. They’ve caught up to the actual release month now, and from this point on they stay more or less synched to it. I guess it’s easier too look up, "When is this one coming out? ... Okay, May, Mother’s Day, nice weather, great," than to calculate out where we’ll be in storytime based on intervening books, especially when multiple ghostwriters are involved and books may not be completed sequentially anymore.
What do You think about Kristy And The Mother's Day Surprise (1997)?
With exams this month, I needed something quick and light to read. Somehow I missed reading this book as a child and had always wondered what happened when Emily Michelle joined Kristy's family. Edie and Watson adopting a toddler from Vietnam was actually more of a subplot in this book and most of the story focused on Kristy and the rest of the BSC taking all the local kids on a field trip to a circus as a Mother's Day present to all the mothers. It's a nice idea, but didn't make the book terribly exciting as nothing eventful really happened except for Andrew skinning his knee, Margo puking on the merry-go-round and Claire and Jenny getting into an argument. I wish there had been more focus on Kristy's family as I love the interactions between all her family members. A cute enough story and it did its job at giving me something to read during exams that I didn't have to concentrate on, but not one of the strongest BSC books. 7/10
—Rachel Brand
What happened in this book is literally child-trafficking.The huge problem with how this all went down is the Brewers literally mail-ordered a child. That's not how foreign adoptions worked in the 80's and 90's. There were still home-checks, and the adoptive parents still had to travel to the other country and remain there long enough to be considered residents (I believe it was six weeks at that time for Vietnam). The point was hoping the adoptive parents would have time to learn about the culture.Elizabeth and Watson did none of that. They contacted an agency, and a child was delivered as a surprise to the other kids. Surprising your kids, who are already adjusting to a move and a change in family dynamics, with a mail-ordered puppy is frowned on. Surprising them with a CHILD?! Worse, a child from a country where girls were routinely dumped into orphanages that are still neglectful!! Emily Michelle likely would have had major attachment issues and probably have been hungry a lot. Tossing her in with strangers who she literally never met would have traumatized her further.I can overlook the planned gift to the moms being a day off (many moms just want a day to relax), but not the buying of a child. Even when I was a kid, I knew something was wrong with how the Brewers literally ordered a child. That was done in the times of Anne of Green Gables, but that practice of just picking an orphan ended decades ago.
—Alys Marchand
So apparently my library stopped stocking the books after number eight. I mean REALLY?! Who does that?? That's why I've been on BCS hiatus. Not by choice. =(
—Lisa
