A new Baby-Sitters Club book quietly confirms what many longtime fans always suspected about club president Kristy Thomas, she has feelings for girls.
The classic series is back with The Baby-Sitters Club Fan Edition: Baby-Sitter Summer, a fresh title that The Sun reported dropped with little fanfare in July, four decades after Ann M. Martin’s first novel took off in 1986.
In the new pages, tomboy club president Kristy Thomas spends a summer babysitting gig in the fictional beach town of Bell’s Bluff, meets a girl her age named Rowan Reitzes, and ends up saying out loud what a slice of the old fan base long claimed was coming.
Martin wrote the book with six co-authors. The story revisits the core club, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, Stacey McGill, Dawn Schafer, Mallory Pike, and Jessi Ramsey, during a break from school.
Kristy’s chapters carry the change. She is living with the Papadakis family on the summer job when she crosses paths with Rowan, a budding photographer. The book describes instant chemistry, hot cheeks, and staring she cannot stop.
Rowan soon tells Kristy she dates girls. That lands with what the text calls a “funny twinge” in Kristy’s chest. After weeks of spending every day together, Kristy says she wakes up thinking about Rowan.
The confession comes during a one-on-one stretch in Rowan’s photo darkroom. Kristy’s own lines do the work:
"My mind wandered back to Rowan. Specifically, the way my stomach felt when Rowan was around. That definitely wasn’t a normal friendship feeling, right?"
She keeps turning it over:
"But did that mean I wanted to date Rowan? What would that even be like, dating a girl?"
Then the line that settles the long-running fan argument:
"I think, I might like girls."
The book does not slap a label on her. Kristy never names an identity. The text leaves her open to dating girls and, by the reporting’s own reading, perhaps boys as well. A dog belonging to Rowan interrupts the talk. The relationship is left unresolved when the story ends.
In the original run, Kristy dated Bart Taylor on and off before telling him she wanted to be just friends. That history is what fed the old rumor mill. The new book puts the suspicion in print instead of leaving it on message boards.
Classic readers did not stay quiet once the pages circulated. On Reddit, one fan wrote, “I always pictured Kristy growing up to have a wife.” Another posted, “I knew it!” A third said, “It’s about time! That’s really cool.”
Those are the reactions the coverage chose to highlight. The series always had a devoted audience that treated the characters like real people and argued for years about who they would become as adults. This release hands that camp a direct quote from Kristy herself.
Martin launched the phenomenon with Kristy’s Great Idea in 1986. A TV version arrived in 1990 and lasted 13 episodes. A 1995 movie followed and featured future stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Schuyler Fisk.
Netflix rebooted the show in 2020. It ran two seasons and then stopped cold. Sophie Grace played Kristy across both seasons. Alicia Silverstone played Kristy’s mom, Elizabeth. Disney Channel alum Xochitl Gomez played Dawn in season one and later won Dancing With the Stars in 2023.
The books made the brand. The screens kept it alive for new kids. The new “Fan Edition” reaches back to the original audience while updating a central character in a way the 1980s paperbacks never did on the page.
The title did not arrive with a circus. It “quietly dropped” in July. No big press tour detail appears in the available reporting. No direct quote from Martin outside the book text is given, only the framing that the revival “confirms” the old rumor about one of the main teen characters.
That is the whole move. A cornerstone series for middle-grade girls now has its president voicing same-sex attraction in a summer subplot, then leaving the door open without a neat label. Fans who wanted that reading got their moment. Parents who expected the old Kristy, softball, clipboard, bossy leadership, and a boy named Bart in the rearview, got a different book than the stack they grew up on.
Children’s franchises keep getting rewritten to match the politics of the present. The babysitters were supposed to teach responsibility, friendship, and a hard day’s work. Now the club president’s big discovery is a darkroom confession, and the people who built the brand chose to print it.
