Book #2: Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
Synopsis: A jewel thief is hitting the area and the BSC members are concerned that the thief will strike while they’re at a baby-sitting job. Meanwhile, there’s a dance coming up and the girls are in a flutter over whether or not they’ll be asked. Claudia is in LUV, as Stacey would say, but isn’t sure if her crush, 7th grade poet heartthrob Trevor Sandbourne, even knows she exists.
Thoughts: Claudia was always one of my favorite BSC members because I love her creativity (and you KNOW she’s going to describe the outfits of all the girls if it’s one of her books!) and I also sort of identified with Claudia feeling like she was never quite good enough, so it was fun to dive in.
The book starts with her reading one of my personal favorite Nancy Drew mysteries: The Phantom of Pine Hill. Hm. Phantom of Pine Hill…Phamton Phone Calls. Coincidence? I think not.
We quickly learn that a jewel thief is on the prowl and their M.O. is to call homes and remain silent if anyone picks up the phone, and then target homes where people seem to be gone. Although the thief or thieves aren’t particularly close to Stoneybrook yet, they’re getting closer and the girls are worried.
And so, in true BSC form, they come up with a plan: if someone breaks in while they’re babysitting, they’ll call another sitter and use a code involving asking whether the other member had found their red ribbon. It was not, shall we say, the most clever plan. They also decided they could set booby traps for potential burglars (maybe Kevin McAlister drew inspiration from this BSC book when he was left home alone and had to fend off the Wet Bandits).
There is a CrAzY ( read: embarrassing) moment when Mary Anne stacks cans behind the door when she’s baby-sitting for David Michael Thomas and forgets to put them away before the rest of the family gets home. Meanwhile, Claudia and Kristy each get phantom calls during baby-sitting jobs. Eventually there is a robbery right there on Braddock Ct. at Claudia’s next-door neighbors’ house and Mary Anne’s dad makes her stop baby-sitting for a while.
As the mystery unfolds, the girls are adjusting to middle school crushes and adolescent hormones. Claudia has fallen in luv with Trevor Sandbourne, a poet who publishes his work in the Stoneybrook Middle School literary magazine. That’s right. They have a literary magazine. And Alan Gray is hanging around a lot, in a way that makes you wonder if there is something more there.
It all comes to a head one night when Kristy and Claudia are babysitting for Jamie Newton and his cousins. They get a phantom phone call and see a shadow outside the window, so they call 911. The officers show up…with Alan Gray in tow! It turns out that he was hanging around in the bushes outside. He just wanted to ask Kristy to the Halloween Hop and had looked in the BSC notebook to see where she was babysitting but kept losing his nerve when he called. Claudia soon finds out that he was helping Trevor and all her of phantom calls were just Trevor trying to ask her out. do the same. In the mean time, the real Phantom Caller is arrested elsewhere (the burglary at Claudia’s neighbors’ house was a copycat) and the girls go to the dance with their new boy friends (not boyfriends, just friends who are boys).
Unbelievable: This is all a little far-fetched for so many reasons: 1) I can’t imagine parents continuing to let their 12-year-old children babysit in a neighborhood where break-ins were happening. 2) The girls totally should have told an adult about all the phantom calls they were getting. 3) Why did the boys always call them at their baby-sitting jobs? They could have much more easily just called them at home. 4) What sort of literary magazine does Stoneybrook Middle School have? This is a suburban Connecticut middle school, not liberal arts college. 5) While she is trying to get things under control, Kristy jokingly tells one of Jamie’s cousins that she will punch his lights out. That…does not sound like something a good babysitter would do.
Lingering Questions/Thoughts: How does Claudia sustain her junk food habit, both in terms of affording all of the stuff and her ability to smuggle it into her house undetected? She’s feeding the club members three times a week and that has to be expensive, and all those bags of Cheez Doodles and boxes of Ring Dings would be hard to get past everyone else. Plus, what does she do with the wrappers? Does she worry about mice?
Also, I know it was 1986, but I was disappointed that Ann. M. Martin played into the “picking on you is how boys show you they like you” trope with Alan Gray and Kristy.
Next Time: The Truth About Stacey
Say Hello to Your Friends 