CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN SLEUTH

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody, by Chelsea Cain, is a totally genius book that I highly recommend to any Nancy Drew fan. It professes to be the true memoirs of Nancy Drew (who claims her loser college roommate, Carolyn Keene, stole all her stories and published them as fiction, but got a lot of the details wrong). It details a number of selected adventures from the 1920s through the present, but Nancy actually ages as the book progresses—she marries Ned Nickerson, has a son (secretly Frank Hardy’s love child!), ages, obsesses somewhat pathetically over sleuthing when her heyday has ended (trying to adjust to life as a housewife, she repeatedly lowers her kid into a well so she can rescue him), and tackles “real-life” cases such as Hannah Gruen (her father’s German housekeeper) being accused of being a communist in the 1950s (turns out it’s all a plot by Richard Nixon to blackmail Eisenhower, who once had an affair with Hannah, to resign from office). The book manages to include and skewer most of the Nancy Drew universe in inventive ways—“tomboyish” George, of course, is a lesbian, and Bess is not in fact “plump” as she is described in the books (that was revenge from Carolyn Keene after Bess stole a guy from her at a party), but being described that way demolishes her self-esteem and turns her anorexic. Not only the Hardy Boys, but also Tom Swift, Cherry Ames, Donna Parker, Trixie Belden (well, her daughter, “Foxy Belden-Frayne”), and even Encyclopedia Brown make appearances. It’s hilarious and I wish I’d thought of it first.