By the
sheer haphazard nature of how I’ve read the books, last weekend I read mystery
#12 and now we’re already into #14. This one’s slightly more realistic,
although I much preferred E.L. Konigsburg’s take on kids living in places where
they’re not supposed to live in From the
Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
The
BSC, including Logan, all have ‘jobs’ working at the mall as part of their
newest short takes class. There has been a lot of shoplifting, and some of the
stuff is atypical for teenaged thieves getting off on the thrill. Big,
expensive stuff is disappearing overnight, while small life necessities are
disappearing as well. It turns out that the mall manager was ‘too nice’—he
spent his entire budget in a short time because he couldn’t say no to anyone.
He made up the deficit by stealing. Meanwhile, some kids who, due to a weird
set of circumstances, were left home alone, moved into the mall in order to
survive. Stacey calls the police, who arrest the manager, and take the kids
into social services and reunite them with their mom.
Interesting
Tidbits
Can
someone tell me why leggings came back into fashion? They don’t look good on
Stacey on the cover, and they don’t look good on the girls who are wearing them
now, either.
Also,
I’m not even going to try to figure out what’s going on in the upper left hand
part of that photo. That’s some, uh, interesting architecture there, I guess.
The
story begins on the final day of a short takes class; this one was called Math
for Real Life and involved balancing a checkbook and playing the stock market,
among other things. That’s something we didn’t really learn about until my
senior year of high school but which I feel needs to be taught younger.
Suggestions
from Stacey’s classmates on what their next short takes class will be:
Zoo-keeping, How to Be a Clown, Advanced Skateboarding, How to Drive Your
Little Sister Crazy. The cap-craziness is theirs, not mine.
I know
the BSC is stuck in an alternate dimension where you can have twelve
Christmases in one year, but if these short takes classes are one month long,
think of how many months they’ve been in the same grade. If you want to be
literal about it, I was five when the first BSC book was published and twenty
when they finally finished eighth grade. Even if you want to be less literal
(who wants to think of 27 year old Kristy Thomas, still in eighth grade,
calling the BSC to order?), they’ve spent a lot of time in one grade.
How
legal is this Project Work class? I mean, I know these kids aren’t getting
paid, but they are actually doing work. It would seem to me that there would be
beaucoup liability issues involved: who’s really supervising these kids? It’s
especially true for someone like Logan, who’s working with food.
Speaking
of, here are the jobs that everyone got. Even if you never read this book
before, you could guess most of them:
Claudia—art
store
Mallory—bookstore
Mary
Anne—pet store
Kristy—mall
security
Stacey—toy
store (because Zingy’s wasn’t an option)
Jessi—movie
theater
Logan—burrito
place
Chapter
five and we haven’t even actually gotten to the mystery yet…
Isn’t
it illegal to leave your child alone at a bookstore or toy store while you
shop? If it’s not, it should be. Some of the kids left alone at Mal’s story
hour are three years old. Haven’t these parents ever heard the story of Adam
Walsh? His mom left him alone in the toy section of a Sears, and when she came
back he was gone. Eventually, they found him…murdered and beheaded.
The
title quote is Kristy’s response to a little boy stealing cookies during the
story hour.
All of
the bosses of our cast of characters are really worried about shoplifting.
Having Kristy work in security is a stroke of genius; she’s pretty much the
only one who would be interested in that and she’s able to check security
cameras after someone shoplifts right in front of Stacey’s nose.
We have
a lot of shoplifters where I work, although they generally don’t go for crap
that’s set at the registers. (None of that is worth much, for the most part.)
Thieves tend to figure out pretty quickly what a) is easy to steal and b) high
dollar. A big deal in my store is pillowcases; a set of two pillowcases can be
anywhere up to $100 and they’re easy to slide into a big purse of the armpit of
a coat. Or there’s always the other method of stealing, which is to pick up a
$700 vacuum in each hand and run out the door with them. Fun times!
Stacey
says that the magic is taken out of shopping by knowing how merchandising and
pricing is decided. That’s an interesting perspective.
There’s
absolutely no babysitting in this book, unless you count the fact that Stacey
constantly has to entertain her boss’s son, Sandy.
Every
time they list all the characters—whether it’s where they’ll be working or what
they’re wearing—I kept feeling like someone was missing. I suddenly realized I
was trying to put Dawn in the story even though she’s still in California.
Maybe I like Dawn a little more than I thought? (Or maybe it’s got something to
do with the Drunk-Dawn fanfic I need to finish…)
I can’t
imagine that the mall director is thrilled about his head of security bringing
her daughter to work with her. He can’t do anything if a store owner chooses to
bring her kid to work, because he’s actually not paying their salaries.
This is
how I felt when I used to work at a now-defunct movie rental place:
Stacey: Did you guys see that movie
poster?
Jessi: I’ve not only seen that
poster, I’ve seen the movie. Ten times.
Are
cheese stores really a thing? Washington Mall has a Cheese Outlet, and there
was one on That 70’s Show. I’d always kind of assumed the latter was a joke
because the show took place in Wisconsin.
This is
one thing I do like about this book: the police and security officers arrest a
group of teenaged shoplifters and BSC members assume the shoplifting will stop
after that. But it’s not normal for one group of boosters to be doing all the
theft. At the end of the book, it turns out that there’s more than meets the
eye (like Transformers!) here. Two different sets of things are turning up
missing: big, high-dollar items stolen from locked storerooms, and little
things that are more like necessities (hair brushes, towels, food, clothing.)
Hey,
shouldn’t Logan be able to help security? After all, he knows a thing or two
about shoplifting.
Stacey
catches someone in the act of stealing from the Toy Town stockroom. All we’re
given to work with is that he’s wearing sneakers, a ski mask, jeans and a light
blue shirt. Leave it to Stacey to notice what someone’s wearing while she’s so
scared she thinks she might pass out.
Heh. On
the bus on the way to and from the mall, the BSC takes up the back two rows of
seats. Claudia and Stacey sit in one seat, Jessi and Mal in another, and Logan
and Kristy alternate sitting with Mary Anne. Can you imagine if Dawn had been
there? They would have had to rotate sitting next to MA. It’s appropriate,
given that Stacey called her “lovable” in the second chapter. Makes her sound
like a stuffed animal or something.
So
someone IS babysitting: Shannon. It sounds like she’s been taking all the
sitting jobs, which makes no sense. The only times she’d have to sit was the
two hours, three days a week while the rest of the club was at the mall.
Shea
apparently developed a crush on Shannon while she was sitting. He kept writing
her poems. Is it horrid of me to ask whether or not she can read them, given
Shea’s dyslexia? (Yup. But I’m putting it out there anyway.)
Mary
Anne, Kristy and Stacey are hanging out at Stacey’s. Mary Anne’s cooing over a
picture of Cam Geary, saying that he looks so good in blue:
Kristy:
Is that why you bought Logan a blue shirt?
Mary
Anne: No! Well, maybe that’s partly why.
Jessi
makes everyone synchronize their watches. These days they’d all just pull out
their cell phones… (Also, I can’t help thinking of a line from one of my
favorite television shows: “Synchronize your watches. It is now…three-ish!”)
New
Characters
Sandy
Frenning (2)—23
Hannah,
Emily and Lea Powers (6, 3 and 1)—27, 24 and 22
Mara,
Kyle and Brenda (12, 8 and 6)—33, 29, and 27
Outfits
Claudia:
white lace baby doll dress (she was looking at it, not wearing it);
conservative dress and pumps; overalls, striped shirt, hot pink bandana
Stacey:
conservative dress and pumps
Kristy:
white blouse and skirt
Logan:
white shirt, blue and red striped tie, corduroy jacket (yes, but was he wearing
pants?)
Mary
Anne: navy dress with a white collar
Mal:
skirt and sweater
Jessi:
skirt and sweater
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