I’ll never lose my love for the great (and not great) middle-grade fiction series of the 80s and early 90s (and probably mid-90s, too; I was the 13-year-old who might read a Babysitters Club book while eating Pop-tarts after school, then finish my day with Toni Morrison), and I encountered many of them while going through my bins of books. To be honest, I kept most of them. I parted with the books for REALLY young chapter-book readers, like Patricia Reilly Giff’s Polk Street School series, which I remember reading until two or three in the morning one night when I was five or six (I had asked my mom if I could stay up all night reading; she, thinking I was joking or maybe doubting my night-owl capabilities, said yes; she was then horrified when she found me awake, reading, in the middle of the night, and I was confused because hadn’t we discussed it already?). I wasn’t big into Sweet Valley Twins unless the particular book had something to do with gymnastics or acting, and I only had a couple of sad Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown entries that I don’t really remember reading…but almost everything else survived the cull.
Definitely still residing in their temporary storage unit home: Sleepover Friends, Babysitters Club, Silver Blades (ice skating, obviously), The Gymnasts, and Ballet School. I believe there are more, but…I only took pictures – thus far! – of the books I got rid of.
Existential question: What makes a work of middle-grade fiction a series book? Does it require that a number be involved? Would you count Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s “Alice” books, which you could put in chronological order and which now number at least 25? I would not, because there is no formula to the structure and plot of each book, nor do the characters mysteriously remain the same age and experience twenty autumns of eighth grade (which, you have to admit, is an EXCELLENT trick; think of how many Halloween costumes you could have in all of those Octobers…). I guess that wasn’t such a hard question to answer after all. Series books are, also, more heavily reliant on thematics. That and their familiar structure are what make them so comforting, and why yes I was horrified and appalled when I learned that some of my friends skipped chapter two – the one in which everyone is introduced and some fun fact or outfit description is given! – of every Babysitters Club book.
I did part ways, however, with some of the preachier series books, like…The Ten Commandments Mysteries? See below, and don’t worship false idols. Teen idols, maybe, according to some other 80s series, but not false idols. And didn’t we already learn this from the Brady Bunch? Tsk.
