‘We Are the Baby-Sitters Club’ Succeeds in Both Praising and Critiquing the Books of Our Childhoods

When we first found out about We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers, I knew we’d do a roundtable review of the anthology because this is the most perfect pairing. It’s no secret that many Autostraddle staff members are lifelong BSC fans, and I’ve always felt in some ways Autostraddle resembles the club/group of friends at the center of our favorite childhood series: fun, hardworking, reliable, loving, complicated.

We assembled a group of enthusiastic readers and dove into the expansive anthology, which features an introduction from Mara Wilson and contributions from Kristen Arnett, Myriam Gurba, Jamie Broadnax, Frankie Thomas, Sue Ding, and anthology editors Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks, to name just a few. Much more than just a one-note love letter, the essays in this book critically and carefully explore everything about the Baby-Sitters Club, from the way the series addressed friendship, race, sexuality, fashion, disability, class, and chosen family to the way the ghost writers committed to introducing each character in repetitive detail at the beginning of each installment. The essays and artwork in the book are just as interesting in form and style as they are in content, with more than a few graphics and comic contributions, many personal essays and cultural critiques, a piece that examines the handwriting of each of the characters, and an entire piece analyzing words used in the series as a dataset! No topic is off limits in this guide about the young adult book series that shaped the way so many of us interacted with our worlds as children, and the way some of us still interact with our worlds today.

Here are four Autostraddle staff members with their thoughts on We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers, out today July 6, 2021. — Vanessa