101: Karen's Chain Letter

[Kylie90210]

Please discuss this book here.

[annieb]

Don't remember much about this one. Does anyone know where I can find a site with bsls ebooks?

[tiff85]

I remember reading this book when Karen's Chain letter ended up getting her in a lot of trouble.

[virgoscorpio]

Woah, I was a little tired of stamps and postcards and letters after reading this. Talk about stamp overload!

[anzuhana]

When I read that Karen had stamps of dinosaurs and flowers, I actually wanted them and I would've liked to see her stamps album. Overall, I didn't care much for this book and it's not one that I would read often.

[supprazz]

We had a way better stamp collection than these kids ever will, so much history in it.

[sillybillygoogoo]

I've had this book for ages, and just read it a second time. It was okay, but not a favorite of mine. I felt bad for Karen when she had to share her stamps with her classmates, even though she had it coming for disobeying ("misunderstanding" ) her father.

[Honeybee]

This was okay book. The whole class wanted to collect stamps after Karen show & share. I think, it's too far fetched. Stamp collecting is fun thing to do. Come on, all of the kids are now interesting in collecting stamps, after Karen show them her Stamp album.


We had show & tell, when I was in elementary school. I love show & tell. I mostly show my classmates of my new toy or something else. But, the classmates didn't all go buy the toy, I shared. All of them, show they're new toys to the classmates.

[CharlotteTJohanssen]

This is the one where Michel from European vacation is mentioned again. Supposedly, he and Kristy have been writing and Kristy has been giving Karen the Canadian stamps.

[booboobrewer]

^Oh, that's cute!

[CharlotteTJohanssen]

It was really cute because Kristy is all excited to get the letter and they've been writing to each other all the time.

She also mentioned Kristy had friends in England. Victoria maybe? Who else did she make friends with?

[sparklymouse]

I wonder how many times the word "stamps" was in this book. Good lord.

I did not know that chain letters were illegal, but that was the very first thing that both Watson and Ms. Colman said. They are apparently only illegal if they ask for money, so if you get any mail from a Nigerian prince probably just throw that away.   I remember things similar to Karen's original chain letter being in the back of teen magazines and stuff.  I agree with her that it was confusing.  That Kidsnetwork group was a legitimate organization, so why would Karen second-guess if it was ok?

Karen didn't want Nannie to get candy orders faxed to her because "how will the post office stay in business if nobody sends mail anymore?"  Yeah, we're still having these debates almost 25 years after this was written.

I didn't like Ms. Colman's decision to let everyone rip the stamps off of Karen's postcards.  I thought the cards should have just been held in the office until the end of each day, and then Karen would have to take them home without showing them to anyone.  And, maybe squash the whole stamp collections at school thing for the entire class.

They got some interesting kids who wrote to them.  Ricky had the son of a Cincinnati Reds player.  There was a horseback rider, a girl who lived on a Christmas tree farm, a boy who collected butterflies, and an only child who wondered what it was like to have siblings.

I don't think I knew 10 kids who weren't my classmates at that age, lol.  I wonder how they didn't end up just sending them to each other.

[m0drnmoonlight]

Were chain letters still a thing when this book came out? I did ones for stickers when I was a kid but that was the early 90s. I'm surprised this book didn't come earlier! Also those chain letters never worked, I never ended up with a ton of stickers, boooo

[livvy]

If it's one thing I can say about Karen is that she's very naive. She believes in everything. She believes in unicorns and mermaids in Karen's Island Adventure. And now she thinks chain letters are good luck just because Maxie told her so. I hoped she stopped writing to Maxie after this.