Amazon.com Review
Nancy Drew with a cell phone? George an avid Web surfer? Yes, folks, the girl detective has arrived in the 21st century, just in time for a whole new crop of tween readers. In
A Race Against Time, Nancy takes on a particularly mean-spirited crime: in the middle of a River Heights bike race for charity, thieves steal tens of thousands of dollars of pledge money. Torn between her desire to finish her leg of the relay and her commitment to solving crimes, our heroine decides she'll do the most good on the case. And off she goes--on bike--to investigate leads all up and down the river. Whether she's trapped in the middle of the night in a shack full of snakes, searching for her missing boyfriend (Ned Nickerson, of course!), or trying to pry information out of the crusty police chief (again), the new and improved Nancy Drew never spins her wheels.
This contemporary series expands on the classic Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene, adding new dimensions to the poised teen investigator while retaining her honorable nature and sharp mind--as well as all her old buddies: tomboy George, girly-girl Bess, and sweet Ned. Don't miss number one in the sequence, Without a Trace. (Ages 8 to 12) --Emilie Coulter
Gr. 4-7. Nancy Drew gets an update--sort of. True, she's now using computers instead of driving a roadster, and the text is now written in the first person, but neither the writing nor the plotting screams twenty-first century. In
Trace, there are two mysteries. The first--Who is stealing or bashing the neighborhood's zucchini crop?--will hardly have kids on the edge of their seats. The second, about a stolen Faberge egg, has slightly more bang for its buck because several teenage boys from France come with it, but it still has lines like "I thought American detectives were old gruff men, like Humphrey Bogart." Bogie isn't exactly a middle-grade icon. In
Race, Nancy, the captain of the Biking for Bucks charity road race, has to find the stolen bucks. Kids love mysteries, and there is a shortage of them, so these offerings, for slightly younger kids than the last Nancy series, will find fans, but as with so many series titles, the writing here is stilted and the characters generic. Try Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes books for mysteries with more substance as well as better style.
Ilene CooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
