Eggs and zucchini may sound like a special Sunday omelet to most, but for Nancy Drew, it means it's time to roll up her sleeves and start solving mysteries. In this first book of the "modernized" series featuring the whip-smart girl detective, Nancy is called upon to solve not one but two whodunits, simultaneously. Someone has been smashing the neighborhood zucchini patches and the disgruntled gardeners are starting to point fingers at one another. Meanwhile, a new resident in Nancy's Midwestern town is frantic when she discovers that her old and precious Faberge egg has been stolen. Can our favorite not-so-hard-boiled detective unscramble both these cases before it's too late?
Fans of Carolyn Keene's classic Nancy Drew series will be pleased to note that, although Nancy has been brought up to date with computers and cell phones, she's still the same sweet girl who volunteers in her spare time. All her old buddies are alive and well: George is still a tomboy, but now spends her time surfing the Web; Bess continues to be a bit of a femme fatale, but only in the nicest way; Nancy's boyfriend Ned remains ever faithful and ever patient; and housekeeper Hannah Gruen is as gruffly, bustlingly loving as always. New readers will love to sink their teeth into a "new" series, and may even be inspired to dig out their mothers' old Nancy Drews (Ages 8 to 12) --Emilie Coulter
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Amazon.com Review
Eggs and zucchini may sound like a special Sunday omelet to most, but for Nancy Drew, it means it's time to roll up her sleeves and start solving mysteries. In this first book of the "modernized" series featuring the whip-smart girl detective, Nancy is called upon to solve not one but two whodunits, simultaneously. Someone has been smashing the neighborhood zucchini patches and the disgruntled gardeners are starting to point fingers at one another. Meanwhile, a new resident in Nancy's Midwestern town is frantic when she discovers that her old and precious Faberge egg has been stolen. Can our favorite not-so-hard-boiled detective unscramble both these cases before it's too late?
Fans of Carolyn Keene's classic Nancy Drew series will be pleased to note that, although Nancy has been brought up to date with computers and cell phones, she's still the same sweet girl who volunteers in her spare time. All her old buddies are alive and well: George is still a tomboy, but now spends her time surfing the Web; Bess continues to be a bit of a femme fatale, but only in the nicest way; Nancy's boyfriend Ned remains ever faithful and ever patient; and housekeeper Hannah Gruen is as gruffly, bustlingly loving as always. New readers will love to sink their teeth into a "new" series, and may even be inspired to dig out their mothers' old Nancy Drews (Ages 8 to 12) --Emilie Coulter
From Booklist
Gr. 4-7. Nancy Drew gets an update--sort of. True, she's now using computers instead of driving a roadster, and the text is now written in the first person, but neither the writing nor the plotting screams twenty-first century. In Trace, there are two mysteries. The first--Who is stealing or bashing the neighborhood's zucchini crop?--will hardly have kids on the edge of their seats. The second, about a stolen Faberge egg, has slightly more bang for its buck because several teenage boys from France come with it, but it still has lines like "I thought American detectives were old gruff men, like Humphrey Bogart." Bogie isn't exactly a middle-grade icon. In Race, Nancy, the captain of the Biking for Bucks charity road race, has to find the stolen bucks. Kids love mysteries, and there is a shortage of them, so these offerings, for slightly younger kids than the last Nancy series, will find fans, but as with so many series titles, the writing here is stilted and the characters generic. Try Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes books for mysteries with more substance as well as better style. Ilene Cooper
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