The Girl Sleuth

Reading The Girl Sleuth was like getting in a car with a friend at the wheel and going back to the neighborhood where we lived from ages 10 - 12. Together we uncovered the probable reasons why my mother and the school librarian disapproved of Nancy Drew and what those series mysteries did for our self images as women. The overt mainstream racism of the earlier editions of the series books is shocking; it gives me some comfort to think that our culture has grown up in the last few decades to understand how very wrong that thinking was. This book was completed in 1975 when Mason was a young post-doc coming off a Nabokov dissertation. It is relatively free of scholarspeak, though the feminism and Freudian references are starkly of their time. It's not dated, however: Mason writes from the heart as well as the mind and this slim book is a timeless good ride.

From Aunt Jane's Girls to Sweet Valley High, series books for girls have been a staple of girls' literary diets. Bobbie Ann Mason (author of "In Country") is one of many who devoured series like The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. She looks back at the books with affection and the amused rememberings of adulthood, but also acknowledges some of the faults of the book - especially in matters of racism, stereotyping, bourgeois entitlement and sexism. She also brings some of the lesser-known girl detectives into the spotlight - especially Judy Bolton, a far more satisfying heroine than the rigid, frigid Nancy Drew. If a college course can be taught on Madonna, then this genre definitely deserves study and reflection for its influence on generations of little women.