Among this spring's fiction offerings are three prequels that set the scene for familiar sagas.
Ann M. Martin offers a slightly earlier look at the lives of the quartet who started the Baby-sitters Club in The Summer Before, which Scholastic will publish in April with a 100,000-copy first print run. The novel, set the summer before seventh grade and the launch of the sitting business, reveals each girl on the cusp of a big change. The same month, the publisher will reissue the first two installments of the Baby-sitters Club, Kristy's Great Idea and Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls; the third, The Truth About Stacy, will follow in June. The series, originally published between 1986 and 2000, sold more than 176 million copies.
Though Philip Reeve sets Fever Crumb in the world of his Hungry City Chronicles series, this postapocalyptic story introduces a new cast of characters. Due from Scholastic Press in April with a 50,000-copy first printing, the novel centers on 14-year-old Fever, who is recruited to assist an archeologist on a top-secret project. The girl, who has been told that she is an orphan, is plagued by memories that are not her own. In 2011, Scholastic will reissue the four books in the series—Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain—which were first published by HarperCollins, as well as a second Fever Crumb book, Web of Air.
Before moving on to her glamorous life in New York City, Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw was a smalltown girl navigating her senior year of high school. That is the story Candace Bushnell tells in The Carrie Diaries, a YA prequel that HarperCollins's Balzer & Bray imprint will release in May with a 500,000-copy first printing. In the novel, Carrie deals with family, friends, and boys—and finds her writing voice.
