A friend and her 10-year-old daughter were telling me recently they’d begun to watch The Baby-Sitters Club, the short-lived Netflix adaptation of Ann M Martin’s books. Eager to show I had something to contribute to the conversation, I told them I’d read the first 52 books in Baby-Sitters Little Sister series this year. After a brief interlude, in which we established for the 10-year-old’s benefit that this was a spin-off which centred on BSC president Kristy Thomas’s seven-year-old stepsister Karen Brewer, the 10-year-old looked at me suspiciously and said: “Yeah, there’s something pretty wrong with that.”
Many people would instinctively agree with her. Here I am, a man in my 40s who has for no discernible reason delved deep into a literature that was supposed to be the preserve of girls. I don’t have a daughter. My two-year-old son hasn’t yet expressed any interest in Karen Brewer and her antics. I’m not reading them for a satirical book club or for a piss-take podcast, as do Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring for their amusing exchanges on Strange Bedfellows. Other than them, I don’t know any other man who has read these books.
