(Spoilers for Nancy Drew)
So right now I am reading some Nancy Drew books, right? Well, these characters are driving me crazy. Let me talk to you about this.
In the first four Nancy Drew stories, the only solid characters we are given are Nancy, Mr. Drew and Hannah. Helen Corning pops up randomly here and there. Can I just tell you the perfection of these gorgeous stories? The old writing. I am addicted to their cuteness. But that is beside the point. We are introduced to Bess and George in the fifth book, The Secret of Shadow Ranch. Which was exceptional also. And Bess and George are much more permanent than all of the other characters we hear about in Nancy's stories that come and go with every mystery. And then The Secret of Red Gate Farm came along, which still had a good story, but this is when things started to go downhill.
So Bess was always more feminine than George, but it honestly was kind of overkill. What the heck happened to the book previous, Carolyn Keene? What happened? George is still a girl, and I know that she's not supposed to be horrendously girly, but she is still a girl. And I feel like some of the things she did she wouldn't do. And George always did tease Bess. But seriously, it was constantly and it was relatively annoying. George, stop being such a bully. But isn't that just the thing? George isn't a bully. What happened?!
And then George has always been more brave than Bess, but this was again overkill. In The Secret of Shadow Ranch Bess was willing to go on all sorts of adventures with George and Nancy. So tell me why in The Secret of Red Gate Farm she is barely willing to do anything with them. It is seriously ridiculous.
Hannah changed a little too, with her interfering with Nancy's mysteries more, but she didn't bother me as much as Bess and George did.
So I read The Secret of Red Gate Farm, and then The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, which maybe I was too excited for because ghosts are interesting, but it was a horrible book. With the same problems with the characters. Maybe it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't good.
Then I read The Clue of the Leaning Chimney, which was a great story but had the same character problems just like in The Secret of Red Gate Farm. I am reading Mystery at the Ski Jump now and the problem with the characters seems to have subsided. Bess isn't running away from every clue anymore and is actually helping with the mystery, and George isn't being annoying about being boyish.
However, I have a theory about this whole thing and why this character problem occurred. This is not fact, but this is what I think may have happened.
Carolyn Keene is the name for a group of authors. So the first Nancy Drew books went by with great stories and no consistent characters. Since Nancy Drew is a never-ending series perhaps it was decided that some solid characters should be added to the stories. So in came The Secret of Shadow Ranch and with that story came Bess and George. That was a good book. But with a group of authors and a never-ending series, it's easier to write characters that you can predict what they do. It's a lot easier to predict a girl who runs from every clue and another girl who denies everything feminine and makes fun of her cousin. So with the excellent story of The Secret of Red Gate Farm came the new Bess and George, which I liked a million times less. This must have gone on for a long time, because The Clue of the Leaning Chimney is the twenty-sixth book in the series and this is still going on. But I don't know when they decided that the characters weren't like they were originally introduced, because Mystery at the Ski Jump is book twenty-nine and the old Bess and George that we originally liked came back.
So that's what I think happened, and I'm glad that it ended, because that easy mistake to make is not my favorite.
Okay, so I hate ending on a note that sounds slightly negative, so I have to write something happy now to end the post. :) #Nerd
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