A blogging prompt for every day of the month of December. Today’s prompt from Reverb Broads, courtesy of Niki: What was your favourite children’s book?
Because this is is a “prompt”, I am claiming creative liberty and rephrasing it to suit my whim: “What was your favourite book (or series) as a child?”
And for the sake of clarity, I am classifying “childhood” as “under the age of 13″.
There. Now that we have that bit out of the way.
I loved reading as a kid (I still do. I just don’t have as much time for it anymore). And I liked many, many books. But there is one book series that always stands out in my mind in relation to my childhood.
Nancy Drew
Ah, the girl detective. My hero. With the side-kick cousins and handsome boyfriend. The bad guys always drove a black sedan, Nancy always had a near-death experience and her father always told her to be “more careful next time”, which she never was. She was everything I wanted to be: 18, fearless…and a detective. I would spend hours every day wrapped up in the drama that was her adventurous life. My mother would actually get me in trouble for reading (I know, right!?) because I would neglect my chores in favour of prancing alongside Ms. Drew as she solved mystery after mystery. I think my record was reading five Nancy books in a single day (which isn’t all that hard…but to girl-me, it was a major accomplishment).
As I got older I started to realize a few strange thinsg about the books. First, Nancy was always the same age. She never got older. I even calculated how old she should be based on how long each mystery took to solve. She should have been like…old. That started to bug me. Second, I began to notice that all the stories were the same. You could basically take the same plot and plug in different characters:
Nancy goes on a vacation. She notices something fishy going on. She investigates. Uncovers elaborate plot. Calls in her cousins/father/boyfriend as backup. Gets into trouble with the bad guys (who drive either a black or brown sedan). They tie her up and tell her all about their wicked plot and say something menacing like “You’ll be sorry!” Nancy escapes (or is rescued). Mystery is solved, bad guys are apprehended, THE END.
In short, it started to get boring.
So I moved on to the classics. Charles Dickens. Emily and Charlotte Bronte. And I discovered my intense love for Jane Austen, which abides to this day.
(I make myself sound all scholarly and astute, but trust me. I also like(d) normal books. Like the Chronicles of Narnia, Madeleine L’Engle’s series, anything period romance and anything fantasy)
