A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Baby-Sitters Club was after my time -- the first one came out in my senior year of high school. Even if they'd been around in my childhood, though, I probably would never have picked them up -- I tended to reject most real-world contemporary setting mundane stories, especially girly ones, as boring-looking, and I had zero interest in babysitting or babies, in real life or fiction. (I loved it when I could find cool girl characters in the kind of adventure/F&SF stories that I preferred to read, but the classic "girl books" people always expected me to read were mostly mundane domestic/friendship stories that didn't really grab my attention. I read them when there was nothing else around because even a dull book was better than nothing, but I could never really get into them.)