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A review by whitneymouse
Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys: The Death of Nancy Drew by Anthony Del Col
2.0
**Thank you to Diamond Book Distributors in connection with SLJ's Teen Live! programming for librarians for the eARC of this title. This in no way changed my rating**
I loved Nancy Drew as a kid, so the idea of a grown up Nancy Drew story was appealing to me. This was very weakly drafted. I don't think even seasoned mystery readers would be able to use context clues to determine who the murderer is and would probably just use their knowledge of tropes to make a guess. There were next to no clues for the reader to follow along with. The characters make wild accusation after wild accusation without thinking anything through. It's a string of people who "know who did it" (spoiler alert: they don't) and a TON of exposition. The entire first chapter is mostly expository boxes and very little dialogue between characters. While this gets better as it goes on, the lack of evidence and the amount of time wasted bickering due to a love triangle between Nancy and the Hardy boys is too much. I really don't care how much either of them love her. I'm here for the mystery. The ending chapter also seemed very out of left field, given that we had only a small amount of interaction with the character at the end. The art was interesting but ugly in a few places. Overall, I think I'd rather just pick up one of the old Nancy Drew books or a Hardy Boys book in place of this one.
I loved Nancy Drew as a kid, so the idea of a grown up Nancy Drew story was appealing to me. This was very weakly drafted. I don't think even seasoned mystery readers would be able to use context clues to determine who the murderer is and would probably just use their knowledge of tropes to make a guess. There were next to no clues for the reader to follow along with. The characters make wild accusation after wild accusation without thinking anything through. It's a string of people who "know who did it" (spoiler alert: they don't) and a TON of exposition. The entire first chapter is mostly expository boxes and very little dialogue between characters. While this gets better as it goes on, the lack of evidence and the amount of time wasted bickering due to a love triangle between Nancy and the Hardy boys is too much. I really don't care how much either of them love her. I'm here for the mystery. The ending chapter also seemed very out of left field, given that we had only a small amount of interaction with the character at the end. The art was interesting but ugly in a few places. Overall, I think I'd rather just pick up one of the old Nancy Drew books or a Hardy Boys book in place of this one.