It’s time for another random review of something I didn’t expect to resonate with me!
The other day I was having a nostalgia moment (something that happens a lot to me, if you couldn’t tell), and started thinking about one of my favorite book series to read when I was much, much younger. I’m sure most people, especially those who grew up in the 90s like yours ghoully, are aware of The Babysitters Club. I’ve actually seen it go through many different incarnations in my lifetime, from the original book series, to a short-lived HBO series, to a few spinoff book series, to a movie, to the current Netflix series and graphic novels. It’s something that’s pretty universal.
However, my favorite thing to come out of the BSC franchise when I was a child was actually the spinoff book series about BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas’s younger stepsister, Karen Brewer: Babysitters Little Sister.
I’m not sure how popular the Little Sister series was, but in my youth, I preferred it to the original BSC books. Probably because when I became aware of it, I was right around Karen Brewer’s age of seven years old, so I found it a lot more relatable than reading about girls much older than myself, doing more grown-up things.
Anyway, something randomly made me think of these books a couple of days ago, and somehow I wound up looking through the titles in the Apple Books. While many of the titles were familiar to me, either because I’d owned them, borrowed them from the library, or stared at them for endless amounts of time at the bookstore trying to decide which one to buy, there were a few I couldn’t recall ever seeing before.
Among these was number 32 in the series, Karen’s Pumpkin Patch.
The Little Sister universe is a strange one, in that it very clearly cycles through a year several times during its 122 (plus six Super Specials) book run, but Karen and everyone around her remain the same age throughout, save for the first handful of books leading up to a birthday story, where Karen is six as opposed to seven. I suppose it’s understandable for a long-running book series, but it is a little odd at times. But anyway, my point here is that I know I owned at least a couple of Little Sister books that were set on Halloween in my childhood (Karen’s Black Cat and Karen’s Chicken Pox come to mind immediately.) but somehow never seemed to be aware of the Pumpkin Patch book’s existence.
So, because I was in a nostalgic mood and it only cost $1.99, I decided to give it a read.
I’m very glad I did, and I only wish I would have discovered it sooner, because it resonates heavily with me now, and I know my younger self would have appreciated it too, more so than any other of Karen’s Halloween-related adventures.
The story begins with Karen and her siblings at her father’s house (the theme of divorce and having two families is always heavy in the Little Sister books) excitedly talking about Halloween, even though it’s apparently not even October yet, while going through old costumes and accessories. This reminded me of myself right away, as, while I may not have grown up with siblings, I was always the first to start talking about Halloween and reliving old memories the second it felt even the slightest bit autumnal. As I read the kids’ words, I could truly feel the excitement, as if I were part of the conversation and I’d just realized that morning that Halloween wasn’t too far away. I honestly never really knew kids my age who seemed to want to talk about and be excited about Halloween in that way. (Actually, the two best friends I had in my childhood and teen years both hated Halloween. One had a family friend who died on the day, which was understandable, and the other was ultimately just a negative grump who liked to complain about everything.) It was nice to see that childhood excitement captured here in a way that I related to so much. It made me feel like a kid again.
The kids put away the Halloween stuff and are asked by Karen’s father to do some yard work. Karen is initially put out because she wanted to make outfits for her pet rat with her best friend Hannie. (Honestly, it makes more and more sense to me now why Karen is portrayed as a spooky kid in the Netflix series.) But, Karen’s father has a surprise: He’s been growing a pumpkin patch and if Karen agrees to help with it, it can be all hers. Karen agrees, and from that moment on, all she can think about is pumpkins! The seriousness with which she takes her role as caretaker to her very own pumpkin patch is truly endearing and it’s hard not to picture her as my younger self as she goes about her tasks of learning as much as she can about pumpkins, tending to the patch, and keeping it safe, all while practically ready to explode with the excitement of the fact that Halloween is on the way.
There is also going to be a Halloween parade with a pumpkin contest, and Karen wants to win the prize for Biggest Pumpkin. She immediately latches onto a big guy in the middle of the patch that she names Kong, short for King Kong. Hannie wants to join the contest for carved jack o’lanterns, so Karen lets her pick out a pumpkin that she ends up naming Martha. The way these girls talk about their pumpkins like babies truly warms my heart, especially after Karen discovers that someone has been smashing pumpkins in the neighborhood! She puts her heart and soul into protecting Kong and the other pumpkins, and when Hannie talks about how sad it would be for the pumpkins to just rot outside in the patch (her sadness on this subject is again something that truly resonates with me and is unlike anything I’ve seen portrayed in children’s media before), Karen devises a plan to sell the pumpkins, first to her friends in her class at school, and then on a larger scale.
Before her class comes for their special early access pumpkin sale, Karen makes a scarecrow and builds a little cardboard house around Kong, so that no one will realize he is there and come back to smash him or anything like that. Her devotion, and yes, paranoia, about her pumpkin’s safety is yet another thing that reminds me so much of myself as a child. I’ve always been an overthinker and a worrywart, especially when it comes to Halloween and the thought of anything threatening it. I remember my devastation when squirrels got to the pumpkins we’d put outside for decoration one year. I 100% would have been just like Karen if I’d had a whole patch of them to worry about! She even asks to sleep in the pumpkin patch one night after finding yet another pumpkin smashed on her street.
One of my favorite parts comes when Karen is selling the pumpkins and a young man she’s never seen before tries to buy one. She starts trying to interview him as if he were adopting a pet from her and one of her older stepbrothers has to intervene and eventually take over the sales, as Karen just can’t bear to part with them. At one point she even says she’ll just take all the pumpkins to her room and have a pumpkin zoo! I suppose the one thing I don’t quite relate to in this book is the fact that she didn’t just plan to do that in the first place!
Karen and her family carve pumpkins on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween. (Karen chooses a different pumpkin than Kong to carve as she wants him to grow as big as he possible can and won’t cut him off the vine until just before the parade and contest.) Karen and her stepbrother David Michael also finally convince their parents to let them go out and make mischief that night after previously being opposed to it. This is also something that brings my childhood to mind, as, once I hit a certain age (though I was a little older than Karen at the time, around ten I think), the kids all started talking about “Goosey Night”, as it’s called here in northern New Jersey, and I found myself suddenly wanting to be a part of that in addition to Halloween, though my parents would’ve killed me. When I eventually did finally get permission, I was just as silly as Karen, David Michael, and their friends, if not more. That will be its own blog post one day, for sure.
However, no sooner did I get done giggling at the Mischief Night chapter than I found myself in tears at the next. Halloween morning comes, and the pumpkin smashers have gotten to Kong! (And also Martha, who Hannie had carved into a dragon and left on her porch.) This was such a sad, heartbreaking thing to read. I’d be upset if someone smashed a pumpkin of mine now, but reading it through a child’s eyes, a child that seemed so much like me for this entire book, made it that much worse. But at the same time, it made me feel less alone. Karen truly grieves for Kong, in the same way that I know I would have too. She and Hannie keep talking about the fact that their pumpkins did not even get to see Halloween. I keep hoping that it will somehow turn out to be a mistake, but sadly it’s not. Kong and Martha are truly gone, and no justice is served. It’s never said who did it. The only very slightly uplifting thing is that Karen and Hannie find another pumpkin in the patch that sort of looks like a cat. They enter it into the contest in the “Most Strangely Shaped Pumpkin” category, and get an honorable mention. I was really hoping they’d at least win after all that, but sadly, they do not.
The story ends with Karen sitting in the patch before going trick-or-treating, and she realizes that when she picked up some of Kong’s remains from the street, she managed to salvage some seeds. The story ends with her going to talk to her father about planting them, to start a new pumpkin patch, while Karen daydreams about a giant pumpkin, a child of Kong, possibly growing next year. I’m tempted to read the next Halloween-set book to see if it’s mentioned at all, but continuity was always weird with this series so I don’t expect it to be. I’m also still upset that no justice was brought to the pumpkin smashers, but I still found this to be an enjoyable, relatable read. I truly saw my childhood self the whole time I was reading this, and while I’ve loved many stories about kids on Halloween, this is the only one I’ve ever really seen have the depth and emotion to it that only a true believer in Halloween can understand.
I know most of the BSC books were ghostwritten after a certain point, and I can’t help but think that whoever wrote this one, truly got it. Karen and Hannie felt like kindred spirits in this book.
Now I’m feeling inspired to find and read more Halloween stuff from my childhood. I doubt any of the stories will hit me like this one did, though. The story of a girl who truly loved and was devoted to her pumpkin patch.
Seriously, read this book if you want to know what I was like as a child when it came to Halloween. It’s the closest I can get to shoving kid-me into a time machine.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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