The Invisible Intruder

I have been reading the new Nancy Drew Diaries and have had a slightly bumpy road with them and I wanted to compare the new Nancy Drew books (I've got one of the Girl Detective books to read soon, as well) to the older ones. I grabbed this one because the only other one I would find my copy for was The Haunted Bungalow and I honestly didn't remember this one at all.


It's very dated. (Ned Nickerson is a ‘special friend' of Nancy's. snicker/snort) But, what surprised me when I started reading was how... almost abrupt the writing is. There's a lot of synopsis' replacing parts of conversations. To me the writing is much more juvenile than I expected. When I compare it to the newer Nancy Drew Diaries, it almost seems amateurish. And the level of emotions in this book is high - I'd even call it melodramatic, personally.

Everything - or nearly everything - seems the sort for HIGH EMOTIONS and, because of that, I have a hard time telling if Nancy is in more danger in the older books than she is in the new books, or if it's just because everything is EMOTIONAL in the older books. (I will say, if this book is an average example of the older books, Nancy is targeted more in the older books than in the newer ones.)

(Also, I find some of the characterizations extremely dated: Ordering rare steak and ‘raw meat for the he-men' and the medium being Roma (but, of course, that wasn't the word they used) and referring to her as a ‘strange creature' is just off-putting.)

To me, as a mystery this book is lacking. It's less of a whodunnit and more of a how-do-we-catch-them? with a side of Scooby-Doo unmasking the ghosts. (Which, now that I think about it, this book did come out in 1969, the same year as Scooby-Doo...)

Oh, by the way, it's dangerous to go alone. Take a man with you.