The narration took away from the story

I am on a quest to revisit my childhood reading favorites. When I was a child, I loved the Babysitters Club books. I devoured them. I read those, along with the Super Specials, Mysteries, Little Sister books, etc. In fact, I still have all of them to this day in paperback. They were such a big part of my love of reading, I could not part with them. So now that they have come out on Audiobook, I had to check them out. As it turns out, I am not too old to enjoy The Baby-sitters Club. It kind of feels like going home again.

Claudia and Mean Janine is book 7 in the Baby-sitters Club series. In this book, Claudia's grandmother, Mimi, has a stroke! Only 13 year old Claudia and her 15 year old sister, Janine, are home when it happens. This book takes us on an emotional journey as Mimi is hospitalized and the family deals with all that entails. When Mimi was ready to return home, Claudia gave up her other babysitting jobs for a bit in favor of Mimi-sitting. There is a lot of drama in this book between the sisters, but even though this book is called Claudia and Mean Janine, it was actually Claudia who was being mean and not attempting to understand her sister or bridge the gap. It took Claudia watching how 4 year old Jamie Newton was behaving with his baby sister, for her to actually start to see how she was the one treating Janine poorly.

This book is a quick listen and is only 3 hours and 2 minutes. The first 5 books all had the same narrator. Book 6 had a different narrator and now this book has a different narrator. Unfortunately, I did not care for this narrator. Her reading and voices took away from the story. Her pronunciations were off. I think that if a narrator is picking up a book in a series, it is important that they pay attention to how the names are said in all of the other books so that it is the same all the way through. In books, 1-6, and 8 since I have already listened to that one, Mary Anne's last name is pronounced Spear and in this book, the narrator pronounces it as Spy-er. Oddly enough, the accents used in this book kind of came off as offensive and distasteful. Also, Janine had a big part in this book so there was a lot of dialogue from her. The narrator's speech pattern and voice for Janine was horrendous. She made Janine sound like a robot and read sentences one word at a time with pauses in between each word. I do not recommend this as an audiobook, maybe just read this one instead.

My love for these books and the nostalgia is holding strong. I am ready to listen to books 8, 9, and 10!

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come relive your childhood.

The narrators for this book are Awesome. Mimi has a stroke in this audiobook. The Kishi family learns how to deal with this.

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Poor Janine

I love how the girls support each other. I really hope Claudia and Janine grow closer.

Poor Claudia

Ann does it again. Mimi sounds like the kind of grandmother I wish I had, shame she has a massive stroke. I'm like Janine in some ways, though I don't use big words or anything, and I've made several friends in real life. Narration is excellent, though why she gave Stacey and a few others rasps, not sure.