The Baby-Sitters Club #33: Claudia and the Great Search

Kristy is worried about Emily because she isn’t learning fast and isn’t picking things up. Claudia winds up sitting for her and notices some of the problems. She works with her on colors for awhile and Emily seems to respond. Mrs. Thomas-Brewer later calls the BSC and asks for Claudia specifically, hoping she can work with her some more.

Being around Emily makes Claudia doubt herself. It doesn’t help that Janine just won another award in school and her parents are going crazy over her. Claudia quickly decides she’s adopted and the more she thinks about it, the more she’s convinced that it’s the truth. She doesn’t look like her parents, she isn’t smart like them and things just don’t add up.

She starts investigating her past and finds weird things. For one thing, her birth wasn’t announced in the local newspaper. Then she discovers a locked box, which she’s sure has her real birth certificate in it. She contacts her doctor for some information, only to learn that she had a different doctor for the first few years of her life. She even reads a book on Stacey’s suggestion about an adopted girl.

Eventually she decides to call a bunch of adoption agencies, but actually only calls one. They can’t help because they’ve only been in business a few years. Then she finds the other kids who were born the same week as her and calls around. She can’t find one woman, but finds all the other kids. She decides that the woman must be her birth mother and confronts her parents.

As soon as she tells her parents that she was adopted, they explain that she wasn’t. The locked box is full of emergency money and isn’t a big deal. Her birth was announced in a different newspaper that went bankrupt. Lastly, she looks like both her parents and also looks exactly like Mimi did as a girl. They give her a photo of Mimi and she has it framed with a photo of her.

*Emily is way behind the other kids, but miraculously after a few sessions with Claudia, she’s almost caught up to other kids her age.

*Claudia notices that her parents have albums full of Janine, but only a few of her and none of her as a baby-baby. Her parents explain that when people have more kids, they naturally take more pictures of the first kid. I call bull shit on that! I have two older brothers and there are a fairly equally amount of photographs of each one of us.

*I’m starting to get sick of Kristy’s attitude, probably because I’ve read a lot of the newer books lately. In this one, she acts like she has to fix Emily, even though her parents aren’t worried. In the later books, she acts like she’s the only one that can take care of Watson or look over him.