Join the Club: 4 Book Series for Kids Who Love The Baby-Sitters Club

While The Baby-Sitters Club books focus on caring for kids, PAWS centers on caring for animals. In this middle grade graphic novel series, three and later four girls and their fellow classmates form a group to pet-sit animals. But pet-sitting is a lot harder than they imagined, and they get into a lot of scraps. The series also explores how to be a good friend. The girls all come from different backgrounds with diverse interests, and though they love each other, this often creates conflict and friend drama. There are currently five books in the series, and they’re all fantastic. Start with PAWS: Gabby Gets It Together.

This delightful chapter book series also centers pets, and follows four girls as they start a pet rescue club. A retired neighbor allows the girls to transform her barn into an animal shelter, and the girls take turns caring for abandoned, injured, and lost pets, as well as helping them find homes. Each book centers one of the four friends as they simultaneously deal with something big in their lives — like parental divorce, injuries, and school competitions — while caring for animals. While Amy and the Missing Puppy is the first book in the series, they can be read in any order. They’re great first chapter books, with large text, lots of space between lines, and illustrations, ideal for ages 6-8. It’s one of my kid’s favorite chapter book series.

When Olive Cobin Zang’s busy parents decide to enroll her in a boarding school, she becomes a member of an undercover tween spy club of misfit students like herself. In the first book, A Royal Conundrum, a jewelry thief threatens to close the school, unless Olive and the team of spies can find her and recover the stolen jewelry. Three books have been completed in this super fun middle grade crime series. It’s a fast-paced, high-stakes series with a different feel from The Baby-Sitters Club, but still with that focus on friendship and teamwork. And hey, The Baby-Sitters Club: Mysteries were my favorite!

There are only two books in the Curlfriends middle grade graphic novel series so far, but both are such wonderful explorations of friendship, Black girlhood, and middle school life. In the first book, New in Town, Charlie creates an anxiety-driven plan to make friends at her new middle school. She longs to join three BFFs who have formed a Black curly-haired girls club, but everything seems to go wrong, despite her adherence to her plan. Book two, Back in Business, follows another one of the girls in the club as her mom’s beauty salon falls on hard times.