My reread: Books 1 - 12
I owned many of the books as a kid and reread a lot of them several times. I know there's certain pieces of lore that either emerged over time (like Dawn going from 'preferring health food and not eating a lot of red meat' to being a 'semi-vegetarian' to being more adamantly a vegetarian) or that get contradicted at times (like Jessi addressing her father as 'Alex' in one of the super specials even though in most books his name is John) - and all this in addition to the typical time loop stuff of the 'summer after 7th grade' happening over and over.
It got me curious about other little pieces of lore that either pop up in the background so I started a reread where I took notes on the series as I went. I'm ashamed to say that my notes document is now 41 pages long which makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. But I wanted to share some things that emerged during my read-through!
- Mary Anne and her father are portrayed as more religious in Mary Anne Saves the Day than I can recall them ever being again; they say grace before meals and Mary Anne prays before bed. That doesn't come up again in the first 12, and I didn't remember it being a particular feature of Mary Anne's character at all.
- Over the course of the first five books, Watson's house goes from being large (Kristy's Great Idea) to "practically a mansion" (Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls) and then to "a real mansion" (Dawn and the Impossible Three) where it remains, to my memory, for the rest of the series.
- Within the first 12 books, Kristy skips two meetings of the Babysitters Club and cancels a third. I have strong memories of later books saying that she has never skipped a meeting ever, so interesting to note how frequently this happened, proportionately, in the early books.
- I cried more during this reread of Kristy and the Snobs than I think I ever cried over the book before in my life.
- I have no concept of the size of Stoneybrook as a town. Kristy moves to the Brewer house which is 3 miles away and is described as being unbearably far, but also Stoneybrook has two public elementary schools, two public middle schools, one public high school and two private schools (not clear what age range the private schools are for). This sounds like a lot to me but I'm mindful as well that I live in Australia; our population density is way lower so my idea of a normal population of a town of any given size is probably really askew by American standards.