Review: Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth by Jane O'Connor

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Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth. by Jane O'Connor. April 3, 2012. HarperCollins. 124 pages. ISBN: 9780062082930

Fancy Nancy has a new hobby - solving mysteries! Gone are the simple sentences and fancy new vocabulary words of the Fancy Nancy easy reader series. Gone are the full-color illustrations of her picture book days. Now Nancy and her best friend Bree are gathering clues and searching for suspects in this brand-new chapter book series. This first book focuses on not one, but two mysterious cases. The first case involves a conversation Nancy overhears in which her friend Wanda tells her friend Rhonda that she has been keeping something from Nancy. The second case focuses on Nancy’s teacher’s favorite marble, which goes missing after Family Day.

I will start out by saying that this series is definitely geared toward kids who are already familiar with the Fancy Nancy universe. There is little mention of Nancy’s fanciness, or her obsession with fancy words, and neither she nor any of the friends mentioned above are introduced in any clear way. This is probably not a huge problem, since I think most kids are familiar with Fancy Nancy, either in picture book format, or easy reader format, but if they were not, it might not be easy for them to jump into this story.

I also wonder what was behind the decision to have Nancy start solving mysteries. She’s not the only one - Judy Moody has started doing it as well - but I wonder if mysteries are really that popular among this age group right now. The only ones that move at all at my library are Geronimo Stilton and A to Z Mysteries, and even then, it’s only among a small group of families. I realize that mystery fiction does tend to lend itself well to a series, but it does seem like a big jump for Nancy to go from being interested in fashion and vocabulary to solving crime in her backyard. I’m not convinced it’s going to catch on.

For me, the mysteries were predictable and easy to solve, but they might not be for kids with not much experience reading in this genre. Still, though, the writing felt generic to me, and I zipped easily through the story in about 20 minutes with very little to say about it afterwards. It was really just okay, and I would say that Fancy Nancy fans, more than mystery fans, will be the ones to call it a favorite.

I purchased Nancy Clancy: Super Sleuth from Barnes and Noble for my Nook. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.