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Judy Who? The Best Mystery Series You've Never Heard OfJul 31 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line The Judy Bolton books stand head and shoulders above the other series mysteries of their kind.
Most kids read series mysteries at some point. Whether they favor the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden or any of dozens of other such books or read them all, some portion of childhood is spent between the pages of these formulaic books with barely aging and rarely changing characters. These heroes and heroines are the Peter Pans of our times, never growing up or growing old. Except one. Judy Bolton begins her literary life as a 15 year old. By the time we leave her literary journeys she's an old married lady firmly settled into adulthood. Imagine that! During the course of 38 books Judy not only ages, but her surroundings and social situations change. So do her dreams and hopes and wishes. She finds herself having to actually choose between two men, both portrayed as good guys. People move away and start their own life that doesn't necessarily revolve around our heroine. Only two things remains constant - that at some point during the course of each book a mystery will evolve and that by the end of the book Judy will have solved it. Everything else is up for interpretation, growth, and change. How refreshing, and, mysteries aside, how like life. Throughout this evolution the characters change yet stay true to their core selves which are revealed slowly, piece by piece, throughout a series of adventures. Characters who are important at one stage of Judy's life are less so at another. Sometimes they do petty things, sometimes they make mistakes. In short, the Judy Bolton books teem with characters who feel like real people, warts and all. That alone is enough to set them apart from the myriad of other series mysteries. The Judy Bolton books were greatly helped by only having one author. Margaret Sutton wrote every word of the series. No Stratemeyer syndicate here. This adds a consistency to the books, both in characterization and in writing style, that is sometimes lacking in the much more superficial and predictable Nancy Drew stories. Like all other series mysteries, Judy often found herself in strange situations and exotic locales. Unlike the characters in those other series she almost always had a good reason to be in those situations. Sure, chance played a big role, but most of the situations here seem plausible as these things go. Combined with the realistic characters this really made me feel like there but for circumstance go I. The Nancy Drew and, to a lesser extent, Trixie Belden books were so fantastical and unrealistic from start to finish that they always struck me as pure fluff without any substance at all. I still enjoyed reading them, but not too many at once or too often, thank you very much. I can read all of the Judy Bolton books from start to finish without feeling like I'm reading the same book 38 times. Basically Judy was a normal teenager with a predilection for becoming embroiled in and solving mysteries who grew into a normal woman who never lost that knack. It's this normalcy and sense of realism that makes the Judy Bolton books stand head and shoulders above the other series mysteries of their kind.  |
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