Little Miss Stoneybrook… and Dawn

Ann M. Martin's Little Miss Stoneybrook... and Dawn is a friendship story for 9 year olds about a town beauty pageant that turns the baby-sitters into rivals.

What happens

Dawn Schafer is telling this one. She moved to Stoneybrook from California with her mum and her little brother Jeff after her parents split up. Dawn has mostly settled in. Jeff really hasn't.

He's sulky and rude at home. Then his teacher rings because he's given a boy a black eye (not for the first time). And this time Jeff asks if he can go back to California and live with Dad for six months.

Mum says yes. Dawn is FURIOUS. She and Mum will be like the two ends of a loaf with all the other slices gone. What a sad and perfect way of putting it!

Things at the club are a bit prickly too. A little girl has asked specially for Claudia as her sitter, and suddenly everyone wants to prove they're the best with kids.

Now the local paper announces a Little Miss Stoneybrook pageant for girls aged five to eight. Mrs Pike asks Dawn to get five-year-old Claire and seven-year-old Margo ready for it. Then Kristy takes on six-year-old Karen. Dawn feels as if it's her team against Kristy's.

Is a pageant sexist? The girls can't agree. Mallory, big sister to Claire and Margo, says she'll absolutely die if one of them wins.

You're right inside Dawn's head, petty grudges and all (she still minds that Kristy never made a fuss when she joined the club).

The coaching is very funny. Margo wants to wear her swimming costume with a grinning felt alligator on the front. Karen's talent is a tap dance in her party shoes and every verse of The Wheels on the Bus.

It's worth knowing that this one is quite emotional at home. Jeff's plan runs right alongside the pageant, and Dawn ends up crying in her mum's lap. If your child has a brother or sister living with another parent, it might feel close. It could also be a comfort, because Mum is honest and kind about it and Jeff explains his feelings really well (he calls it anger bubbling up).

It's American and a little old-fashioned, all home phones and newspaper crime columns. It's the fifteenth Baby-Sitters Club book, so earlier events get a quick mention.

What to read next

If they haven't met the club yet, start with Kristy's Great Idea. That's where Kristy first dreams the whole thing up, and her big mouth lands her an essay on decorum on the very first afternoon of seventh grade.