Reviews

• Nancy Drew and stories

  Bough for a reader of Nancy Drew's stories, this book shows how was created the main characters and the importance of this "young detective" all around the world.

• Nancy Dew and the S&S books!

  This book gives a very accurate history of Nancy Drew novels. Being fortunate to have started reading with Very old Bobbsey Twin books of my Grandmother, then some that were my Mothers and my own series, I also inherited the Outdoor Girls, Rover Boys, Marjorie books, The Blythe Girls, Patty FairfieLd series( which I still have every pre war edition) my brother's 1950' Hardy Boys as well as a few Honey Bunch, Cherry Ames and the later Sue Barton books, I can actually state my great live a reading came from these series books. Fortunately, I had teachers who agreed with my parents that as long as I read what I liked, I would love to read! I still have some of the early editions , pre revisions that have dialect for the Black characters, usually servants; I didn't understand that children carried their own drinking cups as I always had paper cups at water fountains. My Mother explained how this was not the case in the 30's and I actually saw a water barrel with a ladle in Alabama in the late 50's and knew from my Bobbsey book, not to drink! What a great read for a Nancy Drew fan!

• The HERSTORY of Nancy Drew!!!

  Great behind the scenes of the NANCY DREW machinery. Fun read.

• A lively biography--but could go deeper as a feminist/cultural analysis

  Like many of the other reviewers of Melanie Rehak's "Girl Sleuth," I liked this book and found it a fast-paced read. Rehak enjoys her subject matter and has done good research on the two women (Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams) who helped create and sustain the Nancy Drew character. Rehak is good at showing the less charismatic aspects of Wirt Benson and Stratemeyer Adams and still allowing them to emerge as people we care about. In Rehak's portrayal, Wirt Benson was feisty, strong-willed woman who had genuine sisterly feeling for the Nancy Drew she brought to life--whom she also modeled on herself. I especially like Rehak's discussion of Wirt Benson's struggles to make her writing economically sustainable for herself and her ailing husband. In one great passage, Rehak writes about Wirt typing madly away on a manuscript when a can of condensed milk explodes on her stove, sending sticky milk onto the ceiling and convincing Wirt and her husband that they needed to move to a better apartment! "Girl Sleuth" has limitations, though, especially as a feminist and cultural critique. While Rehak presents Nancy Drew as a hero that feminists can love, she minimizes the feminist message of her book by using dismissive terms like "women's libbers." Why not just say feminists? What troubled me more is that Rehak spends little time discussing the overt racism that exists in most Nancy Drew books prior to the series' revision in the late 1950s. This racism and ethnocentrism is preserved in the recently republished copies of several of the original 1930s Nancy Drew books, where, for example, in the first book in the series, "The Secret of the Old Clock," Nancy encounters a "Negro caretaker" whose eyes glisten with drunkenness and who speaks in a nearly unintelligible drawl. In a later book in the original series, "The Mystery at Lilac Inn," Nancy Drew is disappointed in the applicant for a new housekeeper, a "colored woman" who is described as unkempt, shuffling, and disorganized. These passages are so disturbing that many present-day readers will find them reason to close the books and move on, grateful that the series received an updated treatment in later decades. Rehak does mention that as early as the 1940s, readers had written to Grosset & Dunlap to protest against the racism in the publisher's books. But Rehak makes few specific references to actual racially-stereotyped characters or plot events in the Nancy Drew books. As a result, "Girl Sleuth" comes across as avoiding the serious cultural and racial problems in the Nancy Drew books. Since Rehak is an author whose avowed theme is feminism, I would expect her to be focused on exactly those areas. "Girl Sleuth" is a pretty good book. It sent me back to my shelf of Nancy Drews that I had sped through as a pre-teen in the 1970s. But as an in-depth cultural critique, and as a feminist analysis, Rehak's book could go further.

• Didn't like

  Really couldn't get into this book, very dry and not that interesting.

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