Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
by Melanie Rehak
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Book Summary Information
Author: Melanie RehakEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-05
ISBN: 015603056X
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
Book Review: A lively biography--but could go deeper as a feminist/cultural analysis
Summary: 4 Stars
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 its 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? More problematically, Rehak spends little time discussing the overt racism that exists in nearly every Nancy Drew book 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 devote several pages to the fact 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 very few specific references to actual racially-stereotyped characters or plot events in the Nancy Drew books. (Her main example of awful stereotyping is from a book in the Hardy Boys series.) As a result, "Girl Sleuth" comes across as avoiding the serious cultural and racial problems in the Nancy Drew books. As an author whose avowed theme is feminism, shouldn't Rehak 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 a true feminist analysis, Rehak's book does not always deliver.
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