Once upon a time, Kristy's Great Idea was the first real book I read in English. The Baby-Sitters Club series—not in its entirety, maybe around 100 books with gaps between them and just a few specials thrown in—took up the only shelf in the foreign languages section of my school library that was considered appropriate for an 11-year-old kid. I latched onto it, naturally. For me, those books were a literal gateway into a different world. Okay, well, a different country. At that time, for me, it was pretty much the same thing. They were also what made me see actual value in all my endless English classes: I was no longer figuring out the intricacies of Past Perfect Continuous simply to make my parents proud. This foreign language was more than a collection of rules and weirdly spelled words. It was a way to read books that I wouldn't have ever read otherwise—to my knowledge, the Baby-Sitters Club books were never translated into my language.

In many ways, it was a formative experience. 

So reading this collection of essays about other people's formative experiences with the same series was pretty fun. Some were more relatable than others, but nearly all of them were, in some way, deeply familiar.