Some of the books that I never actually owned–I may have been allowed to go to the bookstore every time I had to go to the orthodontist, but I still really raided the library hard–are highly VEXING in how non-specific their titles are. I had been trying to remember for literal years two different series, both about groups of friends (duh, and also, don’t bother trying to consult Google) but finding myself stymied, because
- how can you search if what you remember about a book is not the author, title, name of the characters, or even plot points, but rather how you felt while you were reading it?
- why were multiple series called insipid things like Forever Friends or Friends 4-Ever??
And yes, those were in fact the two series I was looking for. I found one of them because…I guess my Googling skills must have somehow improved, or in any case when I–several years ago–attempted to do a Google search for “pen pals,” “spooky barn,” and “n’stuff boxes,” I really did not have any luck.
(I don’t know if it just didn’t occur to me to search for “teen series”” 80s” “pen pals,” or maybe I didn’t remember the pen pals element, only the barn? In any case…)
So that’s how I found Friends 4-Ever, which did in fact have a book whose cover shows the “pen pals” in a “spooky barn,” and another that I remembered a vague FEELING about but little else (ice skating…enemy moves in…OH YES, C U When the Snow Falls (all of the titles were indeed like that)).
The other series – the equally specific “Forever Friends” series – I’m sure I found only by trolling (actually trawling; I didn’t comment with take-downs of anyone’s taste in YA fiction or anything) various internet compilations of all the 80s and 90s series books. I find the choice of title even dumber in this case because the premise was actually less generic than just “group of four friends (guess what! All of them have different traits that generally don’t overlap; their Venn Diagrams look like a neatly ordered row of plates!). The Forever Friends, at least, had a party planning business (yes, yes, I know that was one of the most common tropes of middle grade series) and each book centered around a particular job/party.
I loved themes, basically. While we’re here, can we talk about how Ann. M. Martin most likely invented the character of Janine Kishi, Claudia’s “genius” older sister, as a way to lampshade the fact that no one (including Martin herself and me) knows how “Babysitters Club” would accurately be punctuated, so best cover all bases by having a sibling with an IQ of 196 who doesn’t know either but can discuss it in detail??
(I’ll never forget that discussion, which lasted several medium-font pages, but I did have to Google Janine’s IQ. I’m not made of magic.)
