I have 2 days left in 2013, so I am going to try my best to finish the Color-Coded Reading Challenge, even though I am going to have to hit the library later this morning when it opens to pull this off. This is a book I have had on hand but hadn't read - the result of an eBay spree several years ago, when I randomly decided to lay in a supply of vintage Nancy Drew, Dana Girls, Hardy Boys, and Bobbsey Twins books (a glass of wine may have been involved - ahem). Luckily I didn't go too crazy, but I did amass a small collection of books that I then neglected to read, which is a good thing because I was therefore able to use 2 of them for this challenge.
Not much I can say about this Dana Girls Mystery Story - it's a product of a different time, when gender roles were more fixed, most white families seem to have some kind of non-white "help" that also provides "comic relief," animals were there only to serve people or be captured from the wild and trapped to be pets, etc. etc. In fact, reading this book (and the next book I will blog shortly) has honestly made me question the presence of these books in my house. The story is simple enough, in the "Carolyn Keene" model, and this book does what it was supposed to do, which is to provide a simplistic mystery story that's not too scary for the small-town and suburban white children of the time in which it was originally written (for this particular book, 1972). Not a terrible book, but "Shakespeare it ain't."
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