A review by charlotte_owl
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak

5.0

I would recommend this book, and not only if you are a Nancy Drew fan. Before I read it, I thought perhaps this book would be a biography of the women who wrote Nancy Drew. But actually it was more than that. It was a history of the book series as a whole, the way the publishing industry around children grew, how publishing and books changed as the decades rolled by, how the public reacted to Nancy Drew, and so on. (And it did have biographical information about the two writers as well). I found this book fascinating. Not just as a Nancy Drew fan, but as a person interested in social history, especially female social history. This book really explains how women's lives changed in the US as the decades rolled by, and how Nancy Drew was a factor in all of them. The way publishing and marketing worked in those days was also fascinating.