When I was about 9 years old, I met my first feminist. Her name was Nancy Drew and she lived in two places: in the mythical town of River Heights and inside me.
Although I didn't know anyone quite like this independent, spirited, intelligent teen-ager who chased down mysteries in her snappy blue roadster, Nancy Drew was as real to me as a close friend.
So great was my involvement with this young sleuth that even now I can still summon up instantly the names and plots of my favorite Nancy Drew books: "The Secret of the Old Clock." "The Mystery at Lilac Inn." "The Clue in the Crumbling Wall." And the thrill of holding a new Nancy Drew book in my hand, my mind already conjuring up fantasies based on the title, lives on: It revisits me every time I begin a book.
So you can imagine the anticipation I felt recently when a friend gave me a Nancy Drew book from her 11-year-old daughter's bookshelf. She warned me it was a revised version of the original -- all the Nancy Drew books as well as the Hardy Boys series were rewritten in 1959 -- and that I should be prepared for some changes.
But her warning in no way prepared me for the "modernized" Nancy Drew. With its plot simplified to the point of dullness, its characters reduced to superficial descriptions and its vocabulary demoted to "easier" words, the new, revised Nancy was a huge '' letdown.
Driving her rented Honda through the Hamptons -- a posh New York beach resort -- in search of boys and romance, this new Nancy just didn't measure up to the one I remembered. Of course, maybe it was only the child in me remembering the old Nancy as an inspiring example of what an independent-thinking girl could do.
That reaction, as it turns out, was exactly what book publisher Phil Zuckerman experienced -- although in his case it had to do with the Hardy Boys. It happened to him while he was reading a Hardy Boys book, "The Mystery of Cabin Island," to his 6-year-old son, Andy. Mr. Zuckerman had read the book at the age of 12 and remembered it, he says, as "the beginning of my relationship to reading."
But something happened as he read the book to his son. "It wasn't at all what I remembered, and I was very disappointed. It seemed so sanitized and watered down. The book I remembered was much richer and more exciting."
