Rereading My Childhood - The Baby-Sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search by Ann M. Martin
In which Claudia doubts her ancestry, dives through microfiche, and attempts some light thievery.
I bet a lot of ‘90s kids wondered if they were adopted. One little spat with a sibling and suddenly you think you’re the long lost granddaughter of Anastasia. It’s wonderful that the stigma surrounding adoption has declined, but that doesn’t mean that your parents found you in a box behind the K-Mart, despite what your older sister told you. Claudia has to learn that not every kid has to be exactly like their family to be blood related. Sometimes, you’re just the black sheep, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Parents love interesting children—unless they’re obsessed with conformity and conservatism. Good luck with your therapy!
In The Baby-Sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search by Ann M. Martin, our favorite artist conjectures that she’s adopted after an award ceremony featuring her genius sister. These things, paired with an absence of baby photos and a mysterious locked box, send Claudia on a biking journey across Stoneybrook wherein she lies to various adults to uncover the secret of her birth.
It is not as sinister as I like to make it sound. Does she lie to almost every adult she encounters during her search? Yes. Does she waste their time? Mostly, yes, but some of them are customer service hourly employees, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a tween girl or a boomer man with no hobbies, the worker’s time is going to be wasted. But it’s all mostly harmless (much like Earth in the grand scheme of the Vogon universe).
I enjoyed the lighthearted approach as we follow Claudia to many of Stoneybrook’s hot spots including like the library, the bank, and the doctor’s office. I watched her failed attempts at subterfuge crumble at the mere mention of identification or a key. It’s hilarious. Her attempts at information gathering through the phone fare better and is a fascinating look at a society that trusts strangers on the phone. There’s even a mention of birth announcements with full names, addresses, and phone numbers in the local paper, a practice I can’t imagine continuing today. I’m not even sure we still announce births in the paper. Or if the local paper exists. All this information is readily available on Facebook—even if you don’t have a Facebook. Somehow your great aunt has obtained pictures of your kids, and she’s peddling them to all her friends/bots/pedos.
As fun as this entry is, Claudia is, once again, comparing herself to her sister. In this one, Janine isn’t doing anything to exacerbate the situation. Claudia is doing this to herself. I understand that it starts with everyone being surprised that Claudia is Janine’s sister, but can’t Claudia just be happy for Janine? Does she have to make fun of Janine’s friends and their propensity for accountant casual (like, actual accountants, the ones who deal with spreadsheets, not the ones who spread cheeks)? I thought we solved this problem with #7: Claudia and Mean Janine(https://open.substack.com/pub/amyacowan/p/the-baby-sitters-club-7-claudia-and)? I can’t believe I’m wishing for Ashley Wyeth (https://amyacowan.substack.com/p/the-baby-sitters-club-12-claudia) to return and attempt to convince Claudia to slather herself in frosting as some radical art piece. I like when Claudia is doing art. I hate when she’s fighting or falling in love with her stalkers or competing with her sister in the most one-sided contests.
The Baby-Sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search has a few funny moments while tackling something that has already been litigated in previous entries. This one is skippable but for the few Claudia devotees who just enjoy reading about their favorite poor speller. Nothing changes. Even the B-plot doesn’t change anything. I don’t even think someone who is adopted will relate to Claudia. The only confirmed adoptee is a baby, and a baby can’t read The Baby-Sitters Club. Unless they’re an exceptionally smart baby, but they probably wouldn’t be reading this review. They’re off winning awards as their teachers rub it in their sibling’s faces!
Should you read The Baby-Sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search by Ann M. Martin?
★★★/5 - Only if you love Claudia. Otherwise, keep listening, I’ll tell you what happens.
Claudia gets to do the only thing in science class she enjoys: leaving early. However, she’s leaving early for a special ceremony celebrating her sister. Well, not just her sister. It’s a celebration for students who have achieved excellence in specific categories. Janine is winning a special award for taking community college classes at the same time. She gets her award, a newspaper reporter asks some basic questions, and a few teachers say that they’re excited to have Claudia in their classes someday, especially if she’s as studious as her sister. I get that it’s annoying to be compared to someone else, but at no point does Claudia express any happiness for Janine, who seems really excited to receive this award. At no point does Claudia say a simple, “Way to go,” to her sister.
There’s the obligatory BSC Meeting. The Papadakis’s patriarch is recovering from surgery so that means Kristy has to babysit them every day. That means she can’t babysit for David Michael, her biological brother, and Emily Michelle, her adopted little sister (this becomes important). Why Kristy, specifically, has to babysit for the Papadakis kids is a mystery I cannot solve. Instead, Claudia is going to sit for David Michael and Emily Michelle.
At dinner, Claudia is mad because Janine’s award came with cash—$250. That is worth $636.99 in 2026 dollars according to US Inflation Calculator (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/). Claudia is incensed when Janine says she’s going to save it for college. How dare she pay for 1/3 of a class when she could be spending it on art supplies and candy?
After a somewhat tense dinner in which her family talks about the award that Janine had just received, Claudia notices a lack of baby pictures and finds a suspicious locked box. This is proof enough of her true identity.
All of a sudden it dawned on me. I knew. I just knew. I was adopted, and my adoption papers were in there. If I were adopted, that would explain why I didn’t look like anyone in my family, and why I didn’t act like anyone in my family, and why there were so few pictures of me. I wasn’t Mom and Dad’s real kid. I was an unwanted baby, or an orphan like Emily Michelle.
Meanwhile, Dawn sits for David Michael, who invites a random new kid over to play baseball (Tommy Hsu, I have no idea if this kid sticks around, he doesn’t sound familiar). Emily Michelle is having some problems learning basic things, and she was recently rejected from preschool. After the way Kristy treated Susan in the previous entry (https://amyacowan.substack.com/p/rereading-my-childhood-the-baby-sitters-0ea), I spent this book dreading the moment that Emily Michelle is diagnosed with autism. I kept thinking, great, now Kristy has acquired a test subject. Luckily, that doesn’t happen, and Emily Michelle does not become a victim of the Kristy Thomas Ignorant Autism Experiments.
Back to Claudia’s pretty okay search. She believes her birth certificate is in a safety deposit box at the bank, so she jumps on her Huffy and tries to bluff her way into the box. The bank teller informs her that she needs a key to get into the box, so she runs away. That was a bust, so instead she goes to the pediatric care clinic. The receptionist says that the doctor wasn’t there for Claudia’s birth. This leads Claudia to think that her parents, the bank teller, the pediatric doctor, Janine, NASA, and Major League Baseball are all in a grand conspiracy to keep her away from her real parents. Claudia doesn’t explicitly say three of those, but inane conspiracies always grow to include random entities like the Home Shopping Network and big knitting skien.
Eventually, Claudia has to stop committing light fraud and do her job, which is sitting for Emily Michelle. She teaches the girl some colors, Mrs. Brewer (née Thomas née something else) observes her teaching methods, and asks her if Claudia could work with Emily Michelle. I feel like that’s Mrs. Brewer’s job, not the 12-year-old who was complaining about the word “species” on page two.
With Kristy and Kristy’s grandmother, Nannie, and preschool, Watson and Mrs. Brewer have all the help they need. In fact, they have so much help, I don’t think they need the rest of the BSC, and they’re shirking their responsibilities onto a group of tweens. Maybe they’re making an effort to support Kristy’s business, which would be nice, especially since Watson is so damn rich, but I only see those two going to auctions and measuring foyer fountains. Surely they could skip the estate sale and play Let’s All Come In with Karen.
Anyway, Stacey sits for the Perkinses. There is some baking shenanigans, and the dog makes a mess. The important thing is that Stacey finds a Lois Lowry book entitled Find a Stranger, Say Good-bye, which is about a girl who is adopted. She encourages Claudia to read the book.
Surprisingly, Claudia reads the book at the library and then goes diving into microfiche. Do you remember microfiche? I remember the machine, but I’ve never actually used it. Claudia finds the birth announcements, and she isn’t there. She doesn’t think that maybe she wasn’t born in Stoneybrook, but she finds other birth announcements, and right there, next to the announcements, are the families’ phone numbers and addresses. If I gave birth and the Reno Gazette-Journal printed my kid’s name, address, and phone number, I would consider that doxing, and I would seek legal counsel. I cannot believe that people would just print their address in the newspaper—even in 1990. Why? Do you expect gifts? Would you even want a gift from a rando who enjoys perusing the birth announcement section of the paper? What if a rando came up to your door and asked about your kids?
Well, that’s what Claudia does. She saunters up to the addresses and asks about their kids under the pretense of a school project. Everyone is forthright and gives Claudia all the information she wants. Even the one she interrogates over the phone. She asks about their kids, new Medicaid opportunities, and their car’s extended warranty, and everyone is so honest. The only one she can’t directly contact lives in Wyoming. Because of this, Claudia determines that Wyoming lady must be her real mother.
Over at the Thomas’ house, David Michael is jealous of all the attention Emily Michelle is receiving from Claudia. He and Kristy play baseball, as the Krushers are getting ready to play the Bashers—the only other team in Stoneybrook it seems. Kristy calls him “handsome.” He likes it. I hate it.
Finally, Claudia confronts her parents. Of course, they’re like, yeah, they definitely know Claudia’s their daughter. The lack of photos compared to Janine is because parents are less enchanted with their second kid. They use more delicate language, but that’s the gist of it. Also, Claudia may not look exactly like her parents, but she’s the spitting image of a young Mimi, Claudia’s grandmother who had passed away (https://amyacowan.medium.com/rereading-my-childhood-the-baby-sitters-club-26-claudia-and-the-sad-good-bye-6403fec12bda). And as for the secret locked box, it’s just emergency money.
Also, Emily Michelle is accepted into preschool, and Claudia will continue working with her. Claudia fails to congratulate Janine, which I thought would have been a nice way to bookend the plot. Instead, Claudia talks to a picture of Mimi, and then she and Janine make dinner.
Nothing is different. Her relationship with her parents is still strained. Her obvious jealousy toward Janine continues. Mimi is still the thread that connects Claudia to the rest of her family. Everything is the same and no one has learned anything or grown as people.
However, we, the reader, have been exploring how conspiracy theories persist despite overwhelming evidence. Her antics while chasing “the truth” don’t placate her assumptions. Instead, each time she encounters a reasonable barrier, she interpolates it as another piece in a grand conspiracy. It’s feeding her delusions, and it will grow until she either cuts it off because it’s the end of the book and everything has to go back to the status quo or she lets it consume her. I guess I’m happy that nothing really changed for Claudia. I’d rather have her fighting with Janine than posting videos with bizarre thumbnails that say things like, “Pencils = Alien Penises?!?!” while shrugging.