Missing Since Monday-- a review, part the first.

(Please note that this is a revised and edited version of a snark that appeared some time ago in the LiveJournal forum BSC Snark.)




When I was a child, I loved The Baby-Sitters' Club. I was borderline obsessed with the Baby-Sitters' Club. I wanted to be a member of the Baby-Sitters' Club. Mind you I don't mean that I myself wanted to join the Baby-Sitters' Club; I wanted to become a character from the book. I wanted to be Claudia Kishi the gorgeous svelte Japanese-American artist and spelling dunce who was required to be described in each book as "exotic." This despite the fact that I am Caucasian, plump and a pretty good student. But I digress; I was in love with the Baby-Sitters' club. And I viewed Ann M. Martin, the author of the Baby-Sitters' Club, as a literary genius. I wasn't alone. Ann M. Martin is one of the most prolific authors in history and has written (or at least had her ghost writers write) well over 200 novels. I thought she was a fantastic writer.




I was wrong.




Recently I've acquired a copy of Missing Since Monday, a young adult mystery penned by Ann M. Martin at the dawn of her career in 1986. This book was published the same year as the beginning of the Baby-Sitters' Club series. Her editors must have know this when they hired her to design the Baby-Sitters' Club, but apparently they never read it. I myself read the book in just one sitting over the course of a couple of hours, because it does have a certain infectuous angsty suspense. There's really only one problem with the whole novel: it sucks. It shows notably less writing skill than even the famously mediocre BSC series did. The characters are swoonily overwritten narcissistic ninnies; the dialogue is terrible; the constant emo internal monologue is absolutely rife with the most appalling cliches; and the plot is so soapy that I've got dishpan hands just from reading the damn thing. It's like some kind of 1980s, Vampire-free version of Twilight. This book is archeological proof that the tradition of Lifetime Original Movies preceded the invention of the Lifetime channel itself.
Have I whetted your appetite? All righty then, let's get to it.

Chapter One: Leigh.
We open with our heroine, such as she is, just returning from a trip to the park with her half-sister Courtenay. The hip offbeat spellings in this book are going to drive me up the wall in short order, I feel, and I'm going to take out my aggression buy pronouncing them phonetically as they appear in my head.
Courtenay, who is sometimes called Cortie, and occasionally called both Courtenay and Cortie by the same character in the same sentence, scampers upstairs to show her mother, Leigh, how messy her candy-stained face is. I'll be mentally pronouncing Cortie's name as "Cort-ten-nay," if anyone is keeping track, and her mother is "Lay" or perhaps "Frito."
Lay is in her illustrating studio; she stops illustrating in horror when she sees her daughter's grass-stained knees and the sticky red patch on her cheeks. She chides Maggie for giving Courtenay a mint, which will "ruin her teeth before she gets to kindergarten" and probably also spoil her dinner. Maggie tries to be casual about her stepmother's chiding. Courtenay seems used to her mother and half-sister bickering. Maggie exposits for the audience that Lay overprotects her daughter and has never gotten along with casual Maggie. Maggie and Lay got off on the wrong foot when they met five years ago: Lay gave Maggie a present and asked to go for a walk while they got to know each other, and Maggie said no because she had plans and has always had a "thing about breaking promises." This made Lay feel "hurt and resentful and suspicious." They've never gotten along since. I can't decide who's the bigger ninny, but right now I'm Team Lay.
Maggie also exposits that Lay and her father are going out of the country on a belated honeymoon this weekend, leaving Courtenay in the care of sixteen-year-old Maggie and her older brother. Lay, who is so overprotective.
Lay asks Maggie to go do her homework, and Maggie goes away "to be alone with my thoughts." She goes to her room, and then she begins to tell us her entire life story, complete with descriptions of her best friends. She really does. Somewhere along the line, Ann M. Martin decided that this was the only way in which exposition should be given. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The following information is divulged in the form of a long, stringy digression: Maggie's mother left home when she (Maggie) was seven and Maggie never sees her, though she does send postcards. There's no resentment on Maggie's part, though; it's just that her mother is such a "creative person, and creative people need space. Well, some of them do." Indeed.
Maggie's Mom's last known address was in the mythical land of California, working in a cafe. Before that, she'd been in Michigan, studying pottery.
Maggie and her brother Mike look just like their mother, whom Courtenay can't remember physically and has only a few photographs from which to verify this statement. They have flame-red hair and "I've got enough freckles on my body to share with half the world." Readers of the Baby-Sitters' Club may recall that Ann M. Martin never missed an opportunity to tell us that redheads are ugly and unlucky comic relief; however, in this book Maggie and Mike are both foisted upon us as good and sympathetic characters. If anything, "tawny-haired" Courtenay is the buttmonkey of this piece. One can only wonder what traumatic experience in 1986 caused Anne's viewpoint on the subject of gingers to shift so radically.
The family lives in Princeton, New Jersey, now, where Lay is a respected illustrator of children's books. Her father works in publishing in New York , where he's met Judy Blume and Maurice Sendak. One ought to get used to the constant name-dropping of much more competent children's authors; it happens with alarming frequency. It's as though Ann sensed that this book was a disaster and wanted to at least make it worth the audience's while by providing them with a list of further reading.
Maggie's boyfriend is one David Jacobssen, and her best friend is David's twin sister Martha. Mike's best friend Andrew DeChristopher has a sister named Jane, who is also Maggie's friend. There must be a thousand less confusing ways to introduce our cast of characters, but the author has elected to just name them in a list like this. Perhaps she should have included a flow chart.

Courtenay comes in at that point and asks Maggie to come to dinner. Maggie realizes that she's been daydreaming about her life story in real time, and is embarrassed. But not as much as she should be.

That night, Courtenay has a nightmare about a red mitten that snores under her bed. This happens to her frequently. It's a fairly creative thing and rings true, which means Ann probably heard it from a real child. Maggie goes to comfort her until Lay arrives, and then goes back to bed. She informs the audience that she's "battling nightmares of my own." They happen even more often than Courtenay's red mitten nightmares, and they terrify her. But she doesn't bother to tell the audience what they are about.

Chapter Two! On Our Own.
Dad and Lay leave for their honeymoon on Saint Bart's in the Caribbean. Maggie dresses Courtenay in lavender baggy pants and a lavender and white striped sweatshirt. This is the first of many instances of the blatant costume porn which went on to make the BSC famous. Mike makes pancakes and bacon, with fresh orange juice, coffee and hot chocolate in the time it took Maggie to dress Courtenay. The family eats together and plays the "lost game" wherein they drill Courtenay on what to do if she's lost or kidnapped, what her phone number is, and so forth. Maggie tells us that Lay doesn't like the Lost Game; it makes her "incensed." She's afraid it will make Courtenay frightened. Lay says that child abduction and abuse never happens in Princeton anyway. So, so far Lay, who is described as so overprotective that she won't let her daughter have a mint before dinner, has jetted off to the Caribbean leaving said daughter in the care of two teenagers, and refused to allow her to be quizzed on her own phone number. Consistent writing is for lesser artists, apparently. The genius of Ann M. Martin is how she keeps us guessing.
Maggie and Mike decided to invite a few friends over for pizza, because Lay will be angry if they have a full blown party. They decide to invite David, Martha, Andrew and Jane over for pizza and hope that Andrew and Jane's creepy older brother Brad won't come as well. Brad likes to blackmail the younger teens into doing things, and he's never been caught. Maggie thinks he's "slime."
The bus comes to take Courtenay to school; Maggie exposits that the bus is always being driven by retired volunteers, but that she doesn't recognize this particular retired person.
After school, Maggie receives another postcard from her mother. She still works at the same cafe.
Then the bus pulls up with Courtenay, this time driven by Birdie, an eccentric old lady with false eyelashes who loves the children. Birdie and Maggie exchange pleasantries.
Such a riveting chapter, no? No, I don't think so either. Let's move on.

Chapter Three: The Weekend.
Courtenay has another red mitten nightmare on Friday night, and Maggie has another of her nightmares as well. She lies awake in bed sweating, waiting for the horrible night to be over. Again, she does not describe this nightmare to the audience. In this entire book, she never describes her nightmares to the audience except to say how terrible they are. I can't remember if this the last or only the second to last time they're mentioned, but the content is apparently none of their business. I like to imagine they're about her sharing her freckles with all the world.
The next morning, as the family eats Grape Nuts, the phone rings. Courtenay tries to answer it, but Maggie stops her in a panic, so quickly that Courtenay breaks her cereal bowl. Mike puts her in the sink to be rinsed off as Maggie answers. It's Leigh, asking how things are going. Courtenay informs her mother that she's naked because she spilled her cereal because she was trying to answer the phone. Lay blames Maggie for this, because Lay is a bitch. Apparently Courtenay is never supposed to answer the phone in case of an obscene caller-- in this chapter, it seems, Lay is back to being consistent with her description. Or maybe Lay just always has the opposite rule Maggie has, no matter what. That seems about right.
That night, Maggie and Mike ready their house with pizza and M&Ms, and set the TV to MTV. The phone rings and Maggie gets it. It's the first of many stalking phone calls to which we'll be treated in this book-- a deep, husky voice whispering "are you alone?" to Maggie. She gets these calls frequently, but has never told her parents so that they won't be afraid to let her babysit.
David and Martha arrive then; David sexily pecks Maggie on the cheek. Then Andrew and Jane arrive with Brad. He blackmailed them into making them take him along by threatening to tell their parents about Andrew's bad grades.
Brad is 21 and a college dropout who works at a pancake house-- this is treated as evidence of his imbalanced mental state. He likes to ask Maggie awkward questions and touch her inappropriately on the leg. She's never told anyone about this. Fortunately Brad is also quite handsome, with olive skin and black hair. So I guess he's supposed to be Italian, though Brad DeChristopher is about the worst made-up Italian name I've ever heard.
Brad calls Maggie "baby" and puts his arm around her. Jane blushes and explains about the blackmail quietly. Maggie exposits that once Brad stole Jane's underwear, so she had to walk home with nothing under her sundress and boys kept lifting the hem to look underneath. I'd say that that makes the random neighborhood voyeur boys the perverts and not Brad, but then I'm a dirty Italian by marriage, so what do I know?
When Maggie comes into the kitchen, she finds Brad bouncing Courtenay on his knee. When she protests, he says "Cool out, Baby. We'll have a lovely evening together if you just relax." Trust Ann M. Martin to provide us with scintillating authentic dialogue.
David and Maggie steal a moment to cuddle in the kitchen and complain about Brad while Mike watches Courtenay. When they come back, Brad grabs Courtenay and says "Let's play horsey, honey." Maggie bundles Courtenay off to bed, but gets the impression she's being followed. When she re-joins the party, Brad has left. Maggie informs us that "a feeling of unease" has settled over her. I couldn't empathize more.


Chapter four! Missing.
Maggie and Mike have fun taking Courtenay to the park all day Sunday, since like all Martin' characters, they're not church-going people. I have no problem with non church-going people, but you'd think a writer writing about the 80s United States would throw in some practicing Christian characters just to look realistic once in awhile in her hundreds of novels. Judging by AMM's books, you'd think America was entirely populated by agnostics and the occasional Informed Jew.
Maggie makes everyone frozen waffles, cleans the syrup off Courtenay, and bundles her into the bus which is being driven by Birdie that day. Birdie mentions that she's going to get her hair done, which seems like a clue to the upcoming intrigue but is actually meaningless banter.
After school, Maggie sits on the porch and studies French while she waits for the bus. When the bus is five minutes late, she begins to worry that there's been an accident. Five minutes later, she calls the school, and is told that Courtenay wasn't on the bus this afternoon. She calls back Jane, who reports that Courtenay wasn't even in school. The school calls back to say that, while Birdie remembers letting Courtenay off the bus, Courtenay was never checked into the school. She's MISSING.
The school secretary informs her that "it's time to call the police."

And on that note of suspense, we shall leave them for the moment; I shall continue the recap in the next installment.