A Race Against Time

May 1, 2004
Gr. 4-7. Nancy Drew gets an update--sort of. True, she's now using computers instead of driving a roadster, and the text is now written in the first person, but neither the writing nor the plotting screams twenty-first century. In " Trace," there are two mysteries. The first--Who is stealing or bashing the neighborhood's zucchini crop?--will hardly have kids on the edge of their seats. The second, about a stolen Faberge egg, has slightly more bang for its buck because several teenage boys from France come with it, but it still has lines like "I thought American detectives were old gruff men, like Humphrey Bogart." Bogie isn't exactly a middle-grade icon. In " Race," Nancy, the captain of the Biking for Bucks charity road race, has to find the stolen bucks. Kids love mysteries, and there is a shortage of them, so these offerings, for slightly younger kids than the last Nancy series, will find fans, but as with so many series titles, the writing here is stilted and the characters generic. Try Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes books for mysteries with more substance as well as better style.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)