No Snark, Just Love

Courtney Summers* frantically tweeted a link to me the other day. "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?!!!" she asked. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a Jon & Kate Plus 8 parody or an Arrested Development .gif. Certainly not an Amazon listing for a new BSC book.

Before there was the Baby-Sitters Club, there were four girls named Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. As they start the summer before seventh grade (also before they start the BSC), each of them is on the cusp of a big change. Kristy is still hung up on hoping that her father will return to her family. Mary Anne has to prove to her father that she's no longer a little girl who needs hundreds of rules. Claudia is navigating her first major crush on a boy. And Stacey is leaving her entire New York City life behind...

...in order to find new friends in Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

The Summer Before . . . is a sweet, moving novel about four girls on the edge of something big - not just the Club that will change their lives, but also all the joys and tribulations of being twelve and thirteen.

Okay, it's 224 pages. So we're basically looking at a Super Special. Here's hoping for alternating narrators, handwritten journal entries, and paragraph-long outfit descriptions.

Man. New Stephen King and Douglas Coupland novels (on the same day, no less) in November. A new BSC book in 2010. Everything's coming up Kim!

* (PLUG ALERT) author of Cracked Up to Be and January's Some Girls Are. You can check out the first chapter of Some Girls Are here. It's a pretty heavy book - after I read it I told Courtney it made her first book look like My Little Pony. She was delighted by this analysis, because she is slightly depraved. In a good way. Sure, she enjoys crafting sympathetic characters and then making terrible things happen to them. So what?