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A review by bargainsleuth
A Nancy Drew Christmas by Carolyn Keene
4.0
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I’ve read a lot of reviews of A Nancy Drew Christmas, and not one of them mentioned the obvious nod to old Hollywood and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window with the plot of the book. The resort owner’s name is Archie Leach, which was the real-life name of Cary Grant, who appeared in four of Hitchcock’s best films. Nancy meets a family whose kid’s names are Grace, Kelly and Jimmy, otherwise known as Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, the stars of Rear Window. If you’ve never seen the movie, Jimmy Stewart spends the entire movie in a leg cast, staring out the window at the neighbors across the street with his binoculars or high resolution camera lens. Nancy spends almost the whole book in a leg cast, spending a lot of her time staring out the window of the horseshoe-shaped resort at the rooms across the courtyard, using binoculars. Even the ending, which I won’t give away, is a direct rip-off of Rear Window,
Spoiler alert: It was weird to not have Bess and George along, but have no fear, the publishers figured out the perfect companions to help Nancy while she’s out of commission: The Hardy Boys. While Frank is quickly banned from the resort, Nancy works well with Joe, who does the “leg work” of the case. Nancy does rely on George’s hacking skills so Bess and George are not completely absent. Carson Drew is conveniently snowed in at home, so Nancy is mostly on her own for this book, which is twice as long as a normal Diaries entry.
There’s a lot of hit-you-over-the-head info dumps about being green, growing your own food, the potential environmental destruction of putting an oil pipeline on the resort’s land, maintaining a sustainable business, how law enforcement can have an agenda, how most mainstream businesses are about corporate greed, crooked politicians, and creating a smaller carbon footprint. It’s a lot to lay on a kid. If you’re not as liberal as the modern Nancy Drew, you might not like this book.
Because of the book’s longer length, more suspects than normal are thrown in to throw off the reader, some more obvious than the others. I figured out the bad guy about half-way through the book, so I imagine most kids will be left guessing until the end. Even if you’ve seen Rear Window, you might be surprised at who the “bad guy” is. And the book is not hit you over the head about Christmas itself, so even if you don’t celebrate the holiday, you might like the mystery.
I’ve read a lot of reviews of A Nancy Drew Christmas, and not one of them mentioned the obvious nod to old Hollywood and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window with the plot of the book. The resort owner’s name is Archie Leach, which was the real-life name of Cary Grant, who appeared in four of Hitchcock’s best films. Nancy meets a family whose kid’s names are Grace, Kelly and Jimmy, otherwise known as Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, the stars of Rear Window. If you’ve never seen the movie, Jimmy Stewart spends the entire movie in a leg cast, staring out the window at the neighbors across the street with his binoculars or high resolution camera lens. Nancy spends almost the whole book in a leg cast, spending a lot of her time staring out the window of the horseshoe-shaped resort at the rooms across the courtyard, using binoculars. Even the ending, which I won’t give away, is a direct rip-off of Rear Window,
Spoiler alert: It was weird to not have Bess and George along, but have no fear, the publishers figured out the perfect companions to help Nancy while she’s out of commission: The Hardy Boys. While Frank is quickly banned from the resort, Nancy works well with Joe, who does the “leg work” of the case. Nancy does rely on George’s hacking skills so Bess and George are not completely absent. Carson Drew is conveniently snowed in at home, so Nancy is mostly on her own for this book, which is twice as long as a normal Diaries entry.
There’s a lot of hit-you-over-the-head info dumps about being green, growing your own food, the potential environmental destruction of putting an oil pipeline on the resort’s land, maintaining a sustainable business, how law enforcement can have an agenda, how most mainstream businesses are about corporate greed, crooked politicians, and creating a smaller carbon footprint. It’s a lot to lay on a kid. If you’re not as liberal as the modern Nancy Drew, you might not like this book.
Because of the book’s longer length, more suspects than normal are thrown in to throw off the reader, some more obvious than the others. I figured out the bad guy about half-way through the book, so I imagine most kids will be left guessing until the end. Even if you’ve seen Rear Window, you might be surprised at who the “bad guy” is. And the book is not hit you over the head about Christmas itself, so even if you don’t celebrate the holiday, you might like the mystery.