Smart, brave Nancy Drew still attracts readers

Nancy Drew, it seems, is known everywhere. Over the past 80 years, her books have been published in 25 languages, and more than 200 million copies have been sold worldwide.

But boiling down Nancy's success into numbers seems to sanitize her, making her more of a thing than a person.

And make no mistake about it, Nancy was — and continues to be — a person to the millions of girls and women who have shared her adventures and friendship through the years.

Introductions to Nancy are as varied as her readers, though many came during childhood and made lasting impressions.

This past Easter, Grace and Sophie Whitehead's great-grandmother gave them the first three books in the Nancy Drew series.

Six-year-old Sophie loves mysteries and was immediately taken with Nancy Drew. "Grace didn't like them, so I thought I would try them," she said. "I like Nancy Drew. She's smart, pretty and brave. Really brave, I believe. And smart."

The first-grader at Upland Terrace Elementary School in East Millcreek has been devouring Nancy Drew, reading three books — on her own — a week. She would read more, she said, but her mom will only let her check out that many from the library at a time.

When they arrive at the library, Sophie runs to Nancy Drew, said her mom, Juli. "Sophie reads all the time," she said. "It sounds bad, but we're always telling her to put her book down."

Up to this point, "The Hidden Staircase" and "The Message in the Hollow Oak" are Sophie's favorite Nancy Drew books — she's on the 17th book right now. The mystery and secret passages make them more interesting, she said.

Nancy is very good at solving cases, said Sophie, who likes to figure things out as she reads. "In one, I guessed the case," she said. "In 'The Hidden Staircase,' I knew what happened."

Sophie plans to reread all the books once she makes it through the series. "I mostly run out of books," she said. "So I'm always looking for more."

As a child, Dixie Hunsaker, now a fifth-grade teacher at Howard Driggs Elementary School in Holladay, read every Nancy Drew book she could get her hands on. She loved the adventure and the excitement offered in the stories, and by the time she was a mother, she had a huge box full of books to pass on to her daughters.