Abby's Un-Valentine

  Not me, I thought. Not me.

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  In Abby’s Un-Valentine, Abby makes it clear that she doesn’t like Valentine’s Day and doesn’t like feeling pressured to celebrate it in a certain way. At the end of the book, Abby spends a very nice Valentine’s Day in an unconventional manner — at the movies with Kristy.

  Although I love holidays and love celebrating them traditionally, some of the nicest holidays I’ve spent have been celebrated in an unexpected or nontraditional manner. For several years now, I’ve spent Thanksgiving with friends in Canada, where Thanksgiving is celebrated earlier in the fall. But my friends prepare a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, and we always have lots of fun. Then there was last year, when everyone in my family had their own plans for Christmas. But we discovered that my father needed heart surgery in December, so we all changed our plans, and my sister and I ended up spending Christmas with our parents, just like when we were kids. It turned out to be a lovely holiday, and in fact the last Christmas we would spend at the house before my parents decided to sell it.

  Holidays are times for celebrating and observing, but you don’t have to celebrate traditionally in order to make a holiday special.

  Happy reading,

  * * *

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Nola Thacker

  for her help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.)In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1998 by Ann M. Martin

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, January 1999

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-87475-5