Laura Lemay reviewed The Mystery at Lilac Inn by Carolyn Keene
Review of 'The Mystery at Lilac Inn' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
The original Nancy Drew reread continues. "Lilac Inn" is the original 1930 edition.
For the first three books in this series my impression had been generally "dated, racist, but better than I expected." This book breaks that pattern. It is still dated and racist/classist (the primary villains here are poor and Irish), but it seemed to take a big step down in quality from the first three.
Interestingly, in this edition (from Applewood) there is a forward from Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the first Nancy Drew books for the syndicate that produced them. She explains in the forward that the original owner of the syndicate had died, and his daughters had taken over. With the transition, she had been instructed to make Nancy much less bold of a character and to focus more on domestic tasks (Nancy spends the first quarter of the book interviewing housekeepers...zzzzzz). This …
The original Nancy Drew reread continues. "Lilac Inn" is the original 1930 edition.
For the first three books in this series my impression had been generally "dated, racist, but better than I expected." This book breaks that pattern. It is still dated and racist/classist (the primary villains here are poor and Irish), but it seemed to take a big step down in quality from the first three.
Interestingly, in this edition (from Applewood) there is a forward from Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the first Nancy Drew books for the syndicate that produced them. She explains in the forward that the original owner of the syndicate had died, and his daughters had taken over. With the transition, she had been instructed to make Nancy much less bold of a character and to focus more on domestic tasks (Nancy spends the first quarter of the book interviewing housekeepers...zzzzzz). This explains a lot.
Also up to this point the books had been told in a close third person POV -- the mystery is revealed only through what Nancy herself experiences, which makes Nancy a convenient stand-in for the reader -- but in this book there are chapters in which Nancy does not appear at all, and it makes the book feel narratively clumsy on top of everything else that was disappointing.