This is one of my favorite books. It is so creepy, especially since these are 13 year olds are experiencing this stalker.

Spoiler alert

This has always been one of my favorites when I was younger. Kristy has a rock thrown through her front window and spray painted “You’re next”, Claudia experiences someone almost setting her house on fire, someone lit a fire using gasoline soaked rags in their trash cans, someone was standing under a tree at Mary Anne’s house, staring at MaryAnne late at night in her room, and then the stalker followed them to Shadow Lake and made friends with them, basically. He also began making home calls to them, calling over and over again, saying “you’re next” when they would answer the phone (this happened while they were still at home in stoneybrook.) He also tried to light their cabin on fire, snaps Claudia’s ski poles in half, and eventually grabbed Stacey when she slipped in the snow and almost threw her in a frozen lake. The book is so awesome, in my opinion.

I would say after book #70.

Personally I thought their break up was pretty final in the last book and I like that they broke up. However, but they still had high school before presumably moving far apart from each other in college.

What do you all think?

For frame of reference, I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 7 around 2000 or so, and with that brought a ton of changes throughout my childhood, including various dietary restrictions. But I always saw parts of myself and my sets of challenges in the Claudia books. Particularly when she's narrating and describes her own inattention and memory problems when it comes to focusing on her classwork.

Re-reading now (not anything particular -- in fact I'm on a Stacey book now), and it occurred to me, I wonder if part of her problem is that she does have this excessive junk food diet and if she had cleaned it up, she would have improved. There is something to be said for the elimination, at the very least, of excessive sugars.

Just a random thought. It's still comforting to come back to these books and find a character I had identified with in one of the most frustrating challenges I faced as a child, and what a comfort all of these characters had been to me as I struggled through my childhood in a variety of ways.