Review: "Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls-The Baby-Sitters Club #2"

Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls: The Baby-Sitters Club #2 by Ann M Martin

3 out of 5 stars

I'm going to give Claudia the benefit of the doubt and say she wore that sweatshirt because she knew she was babysitting and didn't want to wear a good outfit. o.O The second book of the BSC series is narrated by the VP of the club, Ms. Claudia Lynn Kishi (hey, my middle name is Lynn! We're connected! I need to read all her books now! Lol...).

It's close to Halloween and very "gloomy and windy, with rain streaming down from heavy clouds that blocked the moon." Claudia wants nothing more than to read her latest Nancy Drew book and eat some licorice whips (hidden in her desk) and daydream about Trevor Sandbourne, the "most gorgeous boy in the entire seventh grade". He writes poetry. What 7th grade boy in his right mind writes poetry, much less admits to it?? Anyway, that's what she WANTS to do, but nooo...she has to be responsible and do her stupid homework. Luckily, it's Mimi's, her grandmother, turn to help keep her on track so it's relatively painless.

We start this book out pretty quickly with a "What Claudia is Wearing" and I tried my hardest to make a Polyvore for this one, but just couldn't get the right look together. :( But don't worry, I have something even better! In researching the books, I found this awesome blog, Entropificus, that has started drawing their own renditions of Claudia and some of the girls' outfits! They are doing a great job, so I decided to use their drawing of Claudia's outfit this time, which is as follows:

"...purple pants that stop just below my knees and are held up with suspenders, white tights with clocks on them, a purple plaid shirt with a matching hat, my high-top sneakers, and lobster earrings. Clothes like these are my trademark."

Lobster earrings?? Really? Why not clocks? Some cool steampunk clock earrings like these ones from CicadianRhythm would have worked much better!

So, the whole book is about the girls being worried about the "Phantom Caller Burglar", who is this dude that calls rich homes, sees who is home and then robs them when they don't answer. Claudia and Kristy keep getting these hang-up calls while they are babysitting, so they are massively freaked. This is a pretty spooky book...lots of jumpy kids and weird ringing phones and dark, stormy nights with the power going out.

Kristy gets super spooked babysitting Karen & Andrew by Morbidda Destiny..."No wonder Karen thought she was a witch. An old, whiskery face with snappish little eyes sat under a mop of frowsy [what the heck does frowsy mean??] gray hair. And sure enough, she was wearing a long, black dress."

The funniest part though was when Mary Anne, who was babysitting David Michael, was so spooked that she set up "alarms" by all the doors. A big stack of pots and pans, a bag of marbles attached to a string on the doorknob and a tape deck set to play "Poundin' Down the Walls" by the Slime Kings at top volume. The Slime Kings sound awesome. I would totally buy that tape to play on my pink boombox. :) I had the double decker tape deck too, so I could record stuff off the radio. Oh yeah....badly spliced together remixes of "Ice Ice Baby" and "U Can't Touch This". Lol...

Anyway, turns out all the hang-ups where from Alan Gray, "the most disgusting boy in this whole solar system." (Even Pluto, cause it was still a planet back then!) He was trying to get up the nerve to, *gasp*, ask KRISTY to the Halloween dance!! ZOMG!! I thought this was weird, because I don't remember them really liking or even tolerating each other in any of the other books. Oh well, I guess I'll see later. And oh yeah, the awesomely romantical poet, Trevor Sandbourne, was doing the same to Claudia because he liked her.

And then the Phantom Caller Burglar was caught in some other town, everyone but shy, plain Mary Anne went to the dance, Stacey and Claudia wore "baggy jeans and new bulky sweaters"?? Whaaaa???? Seriously? Eh...the end! :)