Review by Frank Plowright

Creator of The Baby-Sitters Club Ann M. Martin has gone on record saying that of all the girls in the club the one most closely resembling her as a youngster is Mary Anne Spier, who’s the club secretary because she’s good at organising. She’s also rather superstitious, as the thrust of Mary Anne’s Bad Luck Mystery is her believing a run of bad luck is due to her discarding a chain letter. It’s followed by several more threatening letters. Who can be sending them? Well, smarter kids will work that out pretty quickly.

Mary Anne’s run of bad luck begins with her falling out of bed, followed by the cat hissing at her and then a minor spillage, More clumsy and embarrassing incidents follow, and then seem to spread to babysitting assignments. Can there really be evil forces at work?

Cynthia Yuan Cheng is new to adapting the Baby-Sitters Club stories, and while there’s still a precision to her art, it moves away from the style established by earlier series artists and brings in influences from Japanese comics. The characters talk with wide open mouths, develop larger eyes, and at one point Mary Anne is drawn with literal stars in hers. It would be a viable approach were Cheng setting the series template, but instead diverges too greatly from it. Cheng also has problems making people seem to move convincingly.

Bad luck accumulates until Mary Anne decides it must be a curse, and needs to be lifted. Martin’s plot cleverly sets events in the run up to Halloween, and it’s not long before any minor misfortune is being attributed to the bad luck curse instead of the type of situation the girls have had to solve on numerous occasions when babysitting. Eventually, of course, the penny drops. Mary Anne’s smart and she picks up a clue that solves the problem.

The story’s aim is to point out that being superstitious creates more problems than it solves. Sometimes a few accidents naturally occur and it’s best not to become too hung up on them. With some reservations about the art, this is the usual solid Baby-Sitters Club adventure, with Stacey’s Mistake the next in the series.