Mary Anne's Book

 

Thoughts before reading:

Well... what can I say about this one? She's my least favorite of the BSC members, so I'm just eager to get it over with. Hopefully it'll at least be interesting. I'm also hoping for a section about her seeking therapy, which was mentioned back in Chain Letter, but we never got to read about.

The basics:

*Mary Anne gets her baby book in the mail from her Grandma in Iowa. Since it was started and worked on by her mom, it makes her cry. 

*She lived with her grandparents until she was 18 months old.

*Her first memory is running to greet her dad when he came home from work.

*She used to watch Sesame Street with her dad, and they would play letter and number games together.

*Went to nursery school with Kristy and Claudia; Kristy looked out for her.

*She didn't like first grade, because her teacher yelled a lot.

*When she was young her dad read to her from chapter books every night before bed. (Aww.)

*At 6, Anne of Green Gables was her favorite.

*She tried to teach herself to walk and read at the same time, like Janine could do.

*Her first grade class laughed at her for inviting her dad to their Mother's Day tea. She got embarrassed and invited Mimi instead... and they both showed up. 

*Mary Anne's terrible babysitters made her, Kristy, and Claudia want to be good babysitters from a young age. (She was left with sitters all the time while her dad was working.)

*The summer after first grade, all three girls took ballet together at the Y, but only Claudia really wanted to. Kristy and Claudia both ended up loving the class, but Mary Anne hated it because she had to dance in front of the class, and they had a recital at the end. She got so nervous about the recital that she made herself sick, so her dad didn't make her do it.

*4th grade was the first year the three girls weren't in the same class: only Kristy and Claudia were together. There was also a new girl named April Livingston in Mary Anne's class, and she was fascinated by her. April wore red glasses, and Mary Anne got fixated on wanting her own. When the class did a vision test, she failed it on purpose. Later, at the eye doctor, she decided she looked terrible in glasses and didn't want them anymore... but she actually wound up needing them for reading.

*We also get a re-hashing of the events from Mary Anne and the Mystery in the Attic, except this time we actually read about the Iowa trip. 

It was miserable at first, because Mary Anne and Verna didn't click at all, and Verna kept criticizing Richard. After they got into a fight, Mary Anne realized that her grandma's just grieving, and she hadn't been a good guest. They ended up talking about Alma. (She also loved to sew and hated cooking.)

*Verna and Mary Anne finished her mother's quilt together, and it won first prize in the local fair.

Timeline:

N/A

Misc. thoughts:

*This was a disappointment right from the start! It skips over all the most interesting info: what was wrong with her mom, Alma, and how did she die? What was her time with her grandparents like? The return to her dad? How did all that go, exactly?

*The basic info is also missing: her birthday, birth stats, etc, that all the other portrait books have had.

*Wouldn't the fact that Mary Anne, Kristy, and Claudia took a ballet class have come up before, because of Jessi? You can definitely tell they just thought this up. A simple solution would've been to just make it literally any other type of dance class...

*Based on the illustrations in here, little Mary Anne was adorable!

*Since when does Mary Anne not like to cook? She's done quite a bit of it, especially before Richard and Sharon got married. Of course that doesn't mean she enjoys it, but you'd think she would have mentioned if she detested it. 

*Richard isn't strict at all in these stories. He seems much different than he was in the first few BSC books.

*I don't remember Mary Anne ever wearing glasses. Is this mentioned in the series, or was this also just made up on the spot?

*Mary Anne also hates soap operas.

*Wow, I didn't realize before that Alma died so young... her mother was working on a quilt as a gift for her 25th birthday when she passed away. That's crazy.

*Mary Anne learned from her autobiography project that she takes herself too seriously.

*She gets an A+ on her project.

*Ghostwritten by Jeanne Betancourt.

*Picture error! At the time of Mary Anne's Iowa trip, she didn't have short hair yet, as she's shown to in here.

Books mentioned:

*Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery

*Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss

My rating:

2.5 stars. Since I don't like Mary Anne even a little, I had low expectations. This wasn't terrible though, just really slow. The stories chosen for this weren't very interesting, and seemed like odd choices to me.