Carolyn Carpan

This was....okay. It reads like a series of undergraduate-level essays, complete with Very Repetitive Topic Sentences sprinkled around. It also covers waaaay too much ground in spotty depth; sometimes I wondered why the author chose certain series to focus on or just give passing mention. Much less cohesive than, say, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. Example: I'm not sure why we got a full chapter on Elsie Dinsmore and treatment of race in that series while Ruth Fielding, whom the author mentions as being a bridge between genres, gets much less attention. Grace Harlowe's exploits in WWI, which seem really unusual for women in series lit at the time, get almost no love. It's almost like the author just wrote about the books she has read, or could get her hands on, and ignored the existence of others.

I have to admit to skimming the last couple of chapters, but I only noticed a paragraph or so on The Babysitters Club, which has to rank somewhere up near Sweet Valley High in terms of late-80s popularity. Maybe too young for the book's focus? I'm really left having no idea. Oh well.… (mer)