As a young reader, I tore through every book about Nancy Drew or Judy Bolton or Beverly Gray that I could lay my hands on. My access to these books was spotty since the library refused to carry them. I occasionally got one as a present and I borrowed and swapped on the playground. Then, the summer I was eight years old, our downstairs neighbour presented me with two massive cardboard cartons: her three daughters’ outgrown collections of series books. I spent the rest of the summer fighting with my mother about why I was not outside in the fresh air, when all I wanted to do was read and read until I had consumed every single one of those treasures – and then read them all again. I took a book outside and read in the fresh air; but I fell asleep in the sun and wound up in a darkened room with heatstroke and a ban on any kind of reading whatsoever, so that strategy was a failure. Nancy or Judy or Beverly would have made a much better job of sneaking around the apartment than I did, but my battle to read all the stories I now owned simply confirmed my devotion to these books.
From time to time as an adult, I have occasionally returned to one series or another and been duly horrified by the casual and focused racism, the snobby class prejudices, and the stupefying plots that they incorporate. And yet, I know that the unexpected gift of so many of these series books at once represents a substantial turning point in my own history as a reader. What had I learned from these banal and stereotyped adventures?
The JNT call for papers gave me a chance to explore this question. I chose to look at the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene and the Judy Bolton books by Margaret Sutton because my memory represents them to me as very different kinds of heroine. As a young reader, I liked Judy Bolton much better, but it was undoubtedly easier to read the Nancy Drew books out of sequence because her backstory is repetitive rather than developmental. Nancy is static, but Judy grows up.
When I looked more closely, I found that Judy is also a much more substantially embodied character. We read as spectators of Nancy’s derring-do, but, even presented through a collection of clichés, Judy is a character who lives with the limitations of the physical world. For example, Nancy’s blue roadster is an accessory that makes life very convenient for her. Judy, on the other hand, must organize transportation with somebody else, or else she must walk to wherever she needs to go – a handicap for a young sleuth that I certainly recognized and resonated to. In many other ways, Judy is much more familiar with the friction of managing her fictional body in the world than Nancy ever needs to learn. As a child, I did not articulate the distinctions between Judy’s grounded endeavours and Nancy’s effortless performances in any specific way; I just knew which one I liked better. It was fascinating to return to the stories and find a textual explanation for my preferences very clearly laid out in the books. And I was intrigued to explore the light shed on how we learn to process book-length narratives.
Nancy Drew is, of course, represented online in a vast variety of forms and formats, but the Internet resources for Judy Bolton are far more selective. I was impressed to learn that the Judy Bolton website (http://www.judybolton.com) is the dedicated work of Christine Kilger, who created this attractive site in 1995 and keeps it up to date with news of activities related to the work of Margaret Sutton. What a tribute to the power of these series books!
Margaret Meek famously told us that “texts teach what readers learn” (1988). Looking closely at texts through the filter of exploring what readers may learn from them about reading itself is an infinitely interesting topic to me. I would not argue that the Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton books are works of great literature, though they are undoubtedly beloved by many. Yet young readers glean permanent lessons about the joys and the skills of reading from these and other such materials, and it would be a short-sighted shame to write them off as of little value.
Learning to master the long arc of a complete novel with the aid of stereotyped series books is just one part of the even longer arc of different people’s lifelong and individual reading journeys. Exploring the communal nature and infinite personal distinctions of such journeys is also a lifelong project, and one that continues to engage me.
(Meek, Margaret. (1988) How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Stroud, UK: Thimble Press.)
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