Why are
the books going Claudia, Dawn, Claudia, Dawn? Luckily, for the rest of the
month we have Mary Anne, then Stacey, then a super special.
Wow,
this one is really dumb. Dawn witnesses a convenience store robbery, seeing the
clown-masked robber and her getaway car. She and the We Heart Kids Club decide
to try to track down the robber by identifying the mask. Meanwhile, Dawn has
been sitting for a boy named Timmy Ford with the DeWitt boys. Timmy’s parents
are separated and he’s been missing his mother, who doesn’t make enough money
to support him. Mrs. Ford is actually the robber; she was trying to get money
so Timmy could come back to live with her. Dawn catches her digging up the
money and turns her in.
Back in
Stoneybrook, the Barrett-DeWitt family has found a house a couple towns over
that has enough bedrooms to hold their whole family. Unfortunately, the kids
are unhappy about moving, so they find a much smaller house in Stoneybrook and
decide to renovate it.
Interesting
tidbits
Dawn
thinks Carol is cooler than she (Dawn) is. Of course, she says that in a kind of
insulting way, as if adults aren’t supposed to be cool. Part of the reason
she’s cool (which seems to be Dawn’s only adjective in chapter one) is that she
watches MTV music videos. There’s a dated reference.
I think
this is around the time that the BSC books started appearing in the same month
that the story takes place. For example, there were several summer books (#76,
#77, mystery #16), then school is back in session in #78. This one takes place
in October, of course.
I’ve
always hated reading books that have mistakes in the way they were put
together. You know when you get a book and there’s a fold in the paper so it
sticks out of the bottom of the book? This one has two pages at the beginning
of chapter two that are shorter than the rest of the pages. My sense of OCD is
making it really hard to concentrate on these pages.
Claudia
should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for ‘Most Chee-toes Consumed.’
Hilarious.
Winona
Ryder gave Maggie a guacamole recipe. Somehow, I’ve never thought of most
celebrities as doing much cooking (and definitely not sharing recipes with the
kids of their producers).
Dawn
thinks adults shouldn’t sing along with the radio. She’s obviously never met my
mother, whom I’m pretty sure is an adult.
“A
mixture of cologne, Band-aids, jelly beans, and suntan lotion.” I guess I never
noticed that drug stores have a distinctive smell.
Dawn
only got a brief look at the robber, but it was enough to identify her shoes.
Richard
drives a Chevy Cavalier….same as the robber.
I love
that the town thinks of ‘cancelling’ Halloween…simply because a convenience
store got robbed. What do they think happens in high-crime areas? My
neighborhood has its share of crime and we still have trick-or-treating. Those
who don’t want their kids out alone either escort them or take them trunk-or-treating
in the mall parking lot. You can’t cancel a holiday. Imagine if they tried to
cancel Christmas or something.
Maggie
recalls a Halloween when she had chicken pox and couldn’t go out with her
friends. That happened to Tessie one year, and she still talks about it. Although most of that actually had to do with
the fact that she was still sick on her birthday a few days later and had to
sit out her birthday party.
Dawn
actually suggests trying to hunt down an
armed robber. Genius, that one.
Do you think
that one week prior to Halloween is enough time to plan and enact a party for
all the elementary school kids? Me neither.
Dawn
acknowledges the California DeWitt/Stoneybrook DeWitt situation, saying she
doesn’t think they’re related.
Hey, I
just realized that after Mrs. Barrett becomes Mrs. DeWitt, both Mrs. DeWitts
are gorgeous. Mrs. Barrett ‘could be a model,’ remember, while the other Mrs.
DeWitt is an actress.
The
title quote refers to Buddy Barrett's bedroom. Although by 1994, I don’t think
kids were into Turtles anymore….
Shouldn’t
the Barrett-DeWitt clan buy a van?
Renting one every time all nine of them go somewhere would probably be more
expensive over time.
HA!
Jessi puts out a giant sigh after getting into the van with the extended
family. Hey, she’s getting paid to be there, so she shouldn’t worry so much
about the kids fighting (especially because they worked it out among
themselves.)
Dawn is
a really, really bad liar.
The
suspect pool is narrowed down to three people who bought the hideous clown
mask: a Palo City high school track team member; a driver for Hank’s Flower
Basket and a ‘tall blonde woman.’
Hey,
wait a minute. How tall is Dawn supposed to be? If she weren’t a witness, she
might be a suspect herself. *shifty eyes*
Halloween
costumes: Jeff: monster; Erick: roll of Life Savers; Ryan: Elvis; Timmy:
Martian; Marnie: jack-o-lantern; Suzi: Princess Jasmine; Buddy: magician;
Sunny: Mrs. Claus; Maggie: Pink Panther; Jill: Marge Simpson; Stephie:
ballerina; Daffodil: good witch; Clover: bunny; Dawn: Pippi Longstocking
Dawn
and Sunny rule out the flower driver who bought the costume for his daughter
(although honestly he could have used the mask to perform the robbery and then
given it to his daughter) and the track-team-boy. The boy is one giant nice-guy
cliché: he even helps a little old lady cross the street. The girls call him
Saint Tom.
Sunny
has an overactive imagination. She tells a woman (behind the counter at the hot
dog place mentioned on the bumper sticker on the getaway car) that they’re
looking for the robber—without saying that—by giving an extremely vague
description. Sunny’s then convinced that the woman is staring at them the rest
of the time…because she’s an undercover police officer. (She actually is
staring, but for a whole different reason.)
They
keep referring to the Barrett-DeWitt clan as the Brady Bunch, and I’ve been
putting together that whole family thing: The parents in the middle, Buddy and
Lindsey in the top corners, Ryan and Marnie in the bottom corners, with Taylor,
Suzi and Madeleine in the middle.
Cheese!
The house the Barrett-DeWitts decide upon isn’t one on a list they were working
off of. It’s actually one Marnie just sees at the side of the house and points
at.
Carol
apparently has a lot of experience putting together haunted houses. When and
where, it does not say.
Umm,
why would you set out food stuff for a haunted house the day before? They might
go bad in advance. Not to mention the fact that they’re blocking the elementary
school gym for 24 full hours.
Sharon
would be that mom who hands out apples and raisins to the trick-or-treaters.
Although when I was growing up, that usually that was the mom whose kids weren’t allowed to celebrate the
holiday for whatever reason.
Dawn
says her dad taught her how to whistle with two fingers in her mouth. Of
course, Kristy can also whistle that way.
Outfits
Carol:
ripped jeans, MTV t-shirt, orange sunglasses
Cynthia
DeWitt (Ryan and Erick’s mom): tacky daffodil print housedress, clunky brown
grandmother shoes, turquoise cats-eye glasses (I used to have a pair like that,
and I miss them so much), yellow cardigan
Sunny:
black leggings and white shirt
New
characters:
Timmy
Ford (8)—29
Next
week: #79
I hate "off" pages in books too!
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