Super cute! I'd read the next two years on my phone except the website is... not exactly easy to read on a mobile browser?

I held it to my chest and felt a spark of joy. That means I don't have to give it back to the library, right?

Lord, that was good.

I don't think I ever read this one when I was younger. That's okay—the story is a bit weaker, with somewhat less colonial racism than other titles, but still definitely contains racist caricatures.

The overall pacing coming into the home stretch was perfect.

I “read” this with my wife as an Alexa skill from Audible and it was a lot of fun, except when we had trouble picking one particular choice because the gadget couldn't understand us.

Some of this has stood the test of time; some of it has not. It’s unquestionably a product of the 1950s.

What struck me most, as a first-time Nancy Drew reader, was how suddenly the narrative jumps into the plot.

I also couldn’t help noticing that there’s a bit of product placement for other books in the series at the beginning (“Since solving [b:The Secret of the Old Clock|32979|The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, #1)|Carolyn Keene|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1351534678s/32979.jpg|151480], she had longed for another case”) and a bit anachronistically at the end: “Although she was glad it was all over, she could not help but look forward to another mystery to solve. One soon came her way when, quite accidentally, she found herself involved in [b:The Bungalow Mystery|156979|The Bungalow Mystery (Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, #3)|Carolyn Keene|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1351535987s/156979.jpg|151491].”

But there’s no product placement elsewhere, falling (to my modern eyes) short on detail. Nancy drives “her blue convertible”. Was it a Thunderbird or an Impala? Yet another mystery for an attractive blonde teen-ager to solve with her attractive friend.

An incisive way of separating the stuff of science fiction into things that are plausible if our research keeps going well, things that would require much more energy than we can currently handle, and things that appear impossible based on our current understanding of the rules of physics.