Paperback Reader

Now you’d think the Bobbsey Twins incident would be like the rye bread incident and I would have given up on all books from the Stratemeyer empire, but it’s clear that reading is stronger than eating, and I not only recovered but went out to read every book in the series. Also many other series, including the Boxcar Children, pretty much everything Carolyn Haywood, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and Lois Lowry ever wrote. Also many other things. I was a diverse child.

Also, yes, the Hardy Boys. At some point, I decided to give Nancy Drew a shot. It was a tough decision. I wasn’t one of those girls who played with Barbies (though my brother had a great doll – yeah, we were all about traditional gender roles in my household). I related more to Frank and Joe than Nancy. I mean, how did she manage to look so good in even the most dangerous of circumstances? I can barely stay unwrinkled for five minutes.

And that’s on a good day.

What I always liked about Nancy was her independence. She wasn’t a girl to sit on the sidelines and wring her hand (Nan and Flossie Bobbsey were hand-wringers, if you know what I mean). It was nice to have a female character who got into trouble…even if her titian tresses remained untousled.

When I heard about Chelsea Cain’s Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, I have to admit I was more than a little excited. Freed from the bonds of her creators – and the misimpressions created by one Carolyn Keene – the true story of Nancy Drew would emerge. This was Nancy in her own words, not a single adverb or exclamation point omitted. This was the story behind the story, the truth, the confession of her real love.

As it transpires, Nancy’s true love was not Ned Nickerson. Ah, talk about your literary red herrings. As fans of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew television series can surmise, it was Frank Hardy who captured Nancy’s heart. But circumstances kept them apart.

The truth about Nancy Drew, as told in a manuscript ostensibly delivered to Cain after Drew’s demise, is, well, wow, a sort of sad and bitter one. In teen sleuth world, nothing really bad happens to the characters. They’re always home in time for dinner. Nancy, especially, had it good. She was popular yet resourceful. You’d never imagine that things didn’t turn out the way she expected.

Cain starts the story in classic Keene fashion, recounting various capers from Nancy’s point-of-view. We learn how she meets Frank in 1929 and how the events of the time keep them apart. They remain cordial but distant as World Wars I and II take the lives of their friends and require their unique abilities. The wars were especially hard for me, the reader, as I learned that some of my original friends did not survive the violence.

Nancy grows up, attends college, marries (Ned), has a child (not necessarily Ned’s), hangs out with other ex- and aging teen sleuths, deals with Women’s Lib, rebellious youth, and grows old. Yet she never really closes the door on her youthful adventures, always longing for one more caper, one more crime. She always wants more from her life, and even girlhood chums Bess and George cannot help her with her gnawing dissatisfaction. There must be more, she believes.

This is where things get weird: the more I learned about Nancy, the less I liked her. I always recall her as the girl who knew what she wanted and how to get it. The Nancy of Carolyn Keene’s vision – Keene, it seems, was actually Nancy’s disgruntled college roommate out to make a buck – would not settle for anything less than the most. The real Nancy doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. Thus, her refusal to accept her lot in life.

Much worse, she doesn’t even bother to admit her mistakes and rectify them. Slowly but surely, life sucks the life out of Nancy Drew. I don’t know if that was Cain’s intent, but what should have been a spot-on parody ends up being a sad commentary on a life half-lived.

Even the romance, the great love of Nancy’s life, feels bittersweet. Frank Hardy is a manly man, but a lonely man. In what feels like a Mills & Boon plotline from the 1950’s, where immoral thoughts and actions, however real, are punishable by death or maiming, Nancy cannot experience true love until she has suffered mightily. She and Frank do not, shall we say?, get it on until their eyes are clouded with cataracts and arthritis precludes the more interesting things two lovers can do.

This was a romance that made me sad. It wasn’t that Cain did not do a great job of capturing the style and tone of the Nancy Drew stories – she hit all the right notes, down to the conveniently placed clues needed to solve the mystery at hand. And George, she probably didn’t need such an obvious resolution, but at least she managed to remain my favorite of the Drew characters.

The one thing, the odd thing, the other thing that Cain didn’t handle well was the fact that Drew memoirs ended up in her hands. That whole aspect felt false…and, yeah, I’m being overly picky. It would have made more sense if Cain had been related somehow or a neighbor or something. Pick, pick, pick. I know.

So in an old-fashioned way, the story of Nancy Drew is a true, classic romance. But it turns out that punishment and suffering don’t create a satisfying ending for me. I don’t mind my characters on the wild side, but I do mind them on the sidelines of their lives. Nancy Drew, it turns out, is not the heroine I believed her to be.

You can find Chelsea Cain here (okay, have I mentioned how irritating it is when author websites are not easy to find?). You can buy Confessions of a Teenage Sleuth here or here. You can argue with me below. C’mon, you know you want to.