Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2006 7:43:53 GMT -5
I really liked this book (maybe because i love cake). It was real ingenious the way they caught the sabotager in the act. Marty is such a muppet. Couldn't he smell the flour?
My favourite bit is the budding Grace and Claudia friendship though.
Shea and Kerry are sooo cute.
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Post by buffykay70 on Apr 3, 2006 22:02:28 GMT -5
i loved this book when i was little but i re read it and it was pretty meh, i guess the magic of BSC books wears off after years and years, hahahha.
it was ok. i liked claudia and her friendship with grace too and almas chocolate cherry cake (i think thats what it was) sounded so yummy, mmmm cake.
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Amalia
Sitting For The Braddocks
Her Original Point of View
Posts: 3,664
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Post by Amalia on Apr 3, 2006 22:44:08 GMT -5
For some reason I liked it that Mari Drabek cooks really messy. She's one of my favorite characters in the series - cooking since five, 3rd place in an art contest, Mathlete, etc. Ooh, I liked Grace's friendship with Claudia also. Only if she could be pulled away from Cokie's influence, as they always tell us. And this book was great. Yeah, that chocolate cake - man.
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Post by booboobrewer on Apr 4, 2006 16:42:59 GMT -5
Chocolate cherry cake...yum!
I also liked when all the contestants went out for pizza, when Claudia was describing her charm bracelet in the beginning, and her getting excited about getting a cordless phone. When I first read this book my family had just gotten our first cordless phone too. It was a big deal around '95 or so, when (I think) this book came out.
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lisa
New To Stoneybrook
Posts: 201
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Post by lisa on Apr 10, 2006 7:01:23 GMT -5
I'd forgotten about the charm bracelet at the start! That was one of the better character descriptions they had.
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jen
Sitting For The Johanssens
Posts: 1,156
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Post by jen on Apr 12, 2006 7:01:51 GMT -5
I loved everything about this book! I think. Oh, wait, I didn't like the Kyle/Megan thing - boring. Actually, I didn't care too much for the daycare subplot, but the restaurant thing they did at the end was cute. I loved the rest, though - the contest, the mystery, how the mystery got solved, the characters.
I also wondered who the lady who gave Jackie the ingredients was... Hmm.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2006 15:59:01 GMT -5
Word on the charm bracelet. It made me want one just like it. I really liked how each charm related to something about Claudia. It was one character description that could actually hold a usual reader's attention. Now that I think about it, that book was a pretty good character book in general, included insight into Mary Anne, Mari Drabek, a relatively unknown stoneybrookite and ofcourse Grace.
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Amalia
Sitting For The Braddocks
Her Original Point of View
Posts: 3,664
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Post by Amalia on Apr 16, 2006 0:08:36 GMT -5
As for Grace, if she was pulled away from Cokie then who would she be friends with? You know, having friends is so important in the BSC . I mean one the reason why Stacey was glad to join the BSC was because she got "instant friends."
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jen
Sitting For The Johanssens
Posts: 1,156
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Post by jen on Apr 16, 2006 1:05:44 GMT -5
Was Mari friends with Cokie outside of this book? She seemed close to Grace and Cokie in this, but in every other book, she's never mentioned as being one of Cokie's cronies.
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Post by lovelylemontree on Apr 30, 2006 15:26:32 GMT -5
Claudia and the Recipe for Danger is one of my favorite mysteries. I really enjoyed the Claudia/Mary Anne pairing. For two people who've grown up together, they never seem to spend any one-on-one time with each other. So, I liked that the book mostly focused on them. And Grace helping with the mystery was great, too. I also enjoyed her in Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade. She should have broken away from Cokie more often.
I didn't care for the ending though. The reveal of the criminal is always disappointing in these books.
Cokie and Grace often acquired a random friend for one book. In one book, Erica Blumberg is part of their group, but then in Stacey's Movie they aren't friends and have apparently never been friends. Another instance of the ghostwriters randomly picking a secondary character off a list and using them inconsistently.
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jen
Sitting For The Johanssens
Posts: 1,156
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Post by jen on May 1, 2006 4:48:31 GMT -5
I thought the ending of this one was one of the better endings! I liked how they caught Marty, and that it was Claudia with the great plan. There was at least a bigger mystery element to this than, say, The Mystery at Claudia's House or Jessi and the Jewel Thieves.
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alula
Sitter-In-Training
Posts: 406
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Post by alula on May 9, 2006 4:10:51 GMT -5
I just reread this one, which was fun because I didn't remember the plot at all. (I did have it in my original collection, but a friend of mine borrowed several, then we had a big fight and she never returned them!)
I know ages in Stoneybrook are all wacky and stuff, but nine-year-olds baking by themselves (kind of)? I bake with my cousins sometimes, and I would never let the nine-year-old actually do the oven stuff, and I remember being really proud about baking brownies for my older brother when I was about eight, and still having to call my mom to put them in the oven. Maybe it just stuck out because I also just read Kristy and the Sister War, and when she bakes with the Kilbournes she makes a point of saying how as a "responsible baby-sitter" she was on oven duty.
(I also didn't understand tampering with the timers--didn't one get reset from 25 to 45 minutes or something? Wouldn't you notice? Maybe I'm neurotic because my oven kind of bites, but I'm always hovering around the last five minutes to check on things anyway).
I'm just too literal, I guess. It's still fun, though--I like Claudia and Mary Anne together (although lots of the time Mary Anne hates cooking/baking), Shea's cute, and I always love any kind of Spier/Baker backstory. And I like the charm bracelet intro, too.
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jen
Sitting For The Johanssens
Posts: 1,156
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Post by jen on May 11, 2006 7:39:02 GMT -5
I suppose it was because there was so much adult supervision there that it was allowed? I never thought of that, though - having kids actually put things in and take things out of the oven by themselves. Maybe the writers never thought of it either, and it was an oversight. There are lots of those in this series And aw, that's so rude of your friend to not return your books!
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Post by greer on May 11, 2006 19:48:36 GMT -5
Mari is an interesting character throughout the series because she often seems such a Random Character. Like she was in the helicopter crash, she was in Claud's art class, she was a mathlete, and here she's a baker.
I think it specifically mentions that she was only on their team because her dad is the pastry chef at Chez Maurice, not because she's BFF with Cokie and Grace or anything.
Erica Blumberg often seemed that way too--just a character to hold up the scenery. She wasn't like Emily Bernstein, who had a really defined role in Stoneybrook. (I love emily, ps--I played her in babysit briefly and it was so fun to conflate the friendly-wth-the-bsc emily with the b*tch in stacey's movie!)
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Post by bscfan24 on May 11, 2006 23:23:39 GMT -5
I loved this book! I need to re-read it though. I forgot a lot of things you guys mentioned. the thing I do remember is whenever Claudia and them won, how she kept trying to come up with a name. What was one of them? "Claudia's Chocolate Cherry Cake"? I remember thinking how selfish that kind of sounded- I mean, Mary Anne was the one who got them the recipe. Of course she's going to want to name it after her mother. I loved that she did that.
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