Chelsea Cain has done a wonderful job of taking my favorite characters from my youth--Nancy Drew, Ned Nickerson, the Hardy Boys (Joe & Frank), the Bobbsey Twins, and several more--and turning them into a 21st-century novel that had me laughing out loud throughout the entire story.

Granted, THIS story is probably not for the teen-set, unless your son or daughter is more mature. The Nancy and friends of THIS book drink and smoke, make out, have sex and even an affair, and in general aren't as perfect as their former counterparts. That said, however, CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN SLEUTH is a thoroughly enjoyable book that reads as a series of mysteries solved, of course, by the aging Nancy Drew. She starts out as the teen sleuth of the 1920's, and ends up an octogenarian in her 80's in the 1990's.

Very funny and amusing, I'm glad I picked up a copy of this book! ( )

Cain's parody of the well-known Nancy Drew series will be mildly entertaining to those fans who catch each facetious detail (Cain has clearly read the series more than once herself) but no more than that. A trip down Memory Lane, but unsatisfying and not incredibly funny as a stand-alone. ( )

The joke grows old and the writing wearisome about forty pages into the tongue-in-cheek prose of Chelsea Cain's Nancy Drew parody. It's a bit of a struggle getting through the sparse narration and even sparser descriptions. While the content and style of the book is a reflection on the original source material of Carolyn Keene's popular teen novels, Cain could have done much, much more. There are so many different ways this could have been handled, but Cain chose the easy way out and played up the dumb aspects while leaving the reader short on depth and substance. Aspects of Confessions of a Teen Sleuth are funny, but most of it is a dry bore. The character twists - George becoming a lesbian, Bess developing an eating disorder - are more amusing in thought than in actual delivery. Let's hope someone new takes the reigns of this parody and flushes it out more thoroughly sometime in the future, because Cain left a lot to be desired. ( )

A parody of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and other series that many of us read in our childhood.

And yet, I found myself wishing it had been funnier. Maybe it's that I'm not as familar with the conventions of the various mystery series being parodied here, having not read one in years. But part of me felt like this was a recent Saturday Night Live skit--good for the first few moments, but extended past the point where it continued to be funny.

The story follows Nancy across her life as she solves various mysteries and deals with the continuity errors from her various stories. It's amsuing, yes and the various mysteries do work hard to send up the elements of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels. But there are times when it feels like Cain is trying too hard to go for the joke or too obviously setting up things for an eventual punchline. I expect a lot of this is the limitations placed on her by choosing to write in the style of a Nancy Drew mystery.

I wanted to love this book, but I came away only slightly amused. ( )

Have you ever felt that Nancy Drew was just a little too good and a little too nice and well, just a little too perfect to be believed? Yeah. Then you’d probably be amused by Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. You see, this is Nancy’s *real* story. And do you ever find out some goodies. Like how she never really was in love with Ned, although she did love him, but was hopelessly in love with Frank Hardy.

Read the rest here. ( )