![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The problem with reading a book about something you already know way too much about is that you will either love it or you will hate it. Carolyn Carpan's Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls' Series Books in America unfortunately fell in the "hate it" category for me, because I disagree with many of Carpan's choices about what to include in this book and also many of the conclusions that she draws.
1. American girls' series is such a broad topic - we're talking literally hundreds of series, many with dozens if not hundreds of books - that it may not be possible to discuss it all in one book, certainly not a book less than 150 pages long.
2. Carpan doesn't seem to realize that there are two kinds of girls' series: single-author girls' series with literary aspirations, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Little Colonel or Betsy-Tacy, and mass-produced girls' series cranked out by ghost writers, like Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High or the Babysitters Club. She's more interested in the second, and the book probably would have been more successful if she had focused solely on the Stratemeyer syndicate or girls' mystery books, which take up the bulk of the book anyway.
But as it is, the book starts with a chapter on Elsie Dinsmore, which is unfortunate both because Carpan doesn't seem to understand Elsie, and because including Elsie makes it harder to justify excluding (or mentioning only briefly) many other popular and influential single-author girls' series. If you've set yourself up to survey everything then you need to hit EVERYTHING, you know?
3. Carpan asserts that "the compliant Elsie Dinsmore...is the model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists that followed her" (7), which is QUITE A STRETCH. The only piece of evidence Carpan offers in support of it is that Nancy Drew, like Elsie, lives in a single-parent household with her indulgent father... except Elsie's father, unlike Nancy's, is so un-indulgent that he forbids Elsie to eat that dangerous luxury jam, so actually I think this is a case where an accidental similarity (single fathers) shows how very different the two series are.
It's possible that Elsie has a successor in some specifically Christian series, but the overarching theme in the Elsie books - the importance of daughters' instant, implicit, cheerful obedience to their fathers, except when the father's commands go against the word of God - is as far as I know sui generis among secular girls' series.
In fact, I can't think of any other girls' series where the parent-child relationship is the most important theme of the story. Even in the Little House books (another series Carpan leaves out entirely!), where Ma and Pa are important characters, Laura's coming of age and her relationship with her sister Mary (and to a lesser extent Carrie) are just as important.
4. Also, insofar as there is one "model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists," it's obviously Jo March, because she's the ur-heroine of American girls' books in general and because Little Women is the first book in a series of either three or four books, depending whether you count Little Women and Good Wives separately.
5. Chapters 3 to 8 move chronologically through books from the 1920s to the 1980s. The analysis seems stronger - I got the sense that these are the books Carpan really cares about, not the ones she had to read to try to make her survey complete - but it could also just be that her analysis seems stronger to me because I'm not familiar with most of the books she writes about, so I can't knowledgeably disagree.
6. I SUPER disagreed with a lot of Carpan's choices once she reached the 1990s, not least of which is the fact that somewhere around the sixties and seventies she seems to have narrowed her focus from "books for girls" to "books for teenage girls" without quite seeming to notice. How else could you possibly justify the fact that she devotes one paragraph to the incredibly popular Babysitters Club series?
(Also, she dings BSC because "by promoting babysitting the series may encourage preteen and teen readers to focus on mothering as their primary goal in life" (123), which I think shows a complete failure to actually engage with the series, which is about entrepreneurship and friendship and developing your own individual strengths and talents as much as it is about babysitting, and also shows the shallowness of Carpan's intellectual framework for this book, which might without oversimplification be described as Marriage and Motherhood Bad, Sports and Careers Good.)
But then, Meg Cabot gets only a paragraph as well, and her series are definitely aimed at teenage girls, so who knows what's up with that.
There's also no mention at all of horse series (Heartland and Thoroughbred ought to fall in the teen-girl purview, even if Saddle Club and Pony Pals are too young), only brief mention of magic-themed series - Carpan mentions Cate Tiernan's Sweep but not Daughters of the Moon or Circle of Three - and for some reason a whole section devoted to Goosebumps and Fear Street, which insofar as they were gendered were marketed at boys.
1. American girls' series is such a broad topic - we're talking literally hundreds of series, many with dozens if not hundreds of books - that it may not be possible to discuss it all in one book, certainly not a book less than 150 pages long.
2. Carpan doesn't seem to realize that there are two kinds of girls' series: single-author girls' series with literary aspirations, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Little Colonel or Betsy-Tacy, and mass-produced girls' series cranked out by ghost writers, like Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High or the Babysitters Club. She's more interested in the second, and the book probably would have been more successful if she had focused solely on the Stratemeyer syndicate or girls' mystery books, which take up the bulk of the book anyway.
But as it is, the book starts with a chapter on Elsie Dinsmore, which is unfortunate both because Carpan doesn't seem to understand Elsie, and because including Elsie makes it harder to justify excluding (or mentioning only briefly) many other popular and influential single-author girls' series. If you've set yourself up to survey everything then you need to hit EVERYTHING, you know?
3. Carpan asserts that "the compliant Elsie Dinsmore...is the model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists that followed her" (7), which is QUITE A STRETCH. The only piece of evidence Carpan offers in support of it is that Nancy Drew, like Elsie, lives in a single-parent household with her indulgent father... except Elsie's father, unlike Nancy's, is so un-indulgent that he forbids Elsie to eat that dangerous luxury jam, so actually I think this is a case where an accidental similarity (single fathers) shows how very different the two series are.
It's possible that Elsie has a successor in some specifically Christian series, but the overarching theme in the Elsie books - the importance of daughters' instant, implicit, cheerful obedience to their fathers, except when the father's commands go against the word of God - is as far as I know sui generis among secular girls' series.
In fact, I can't think of any other girls' series where the parent-child relationship is the most important theme of the story. Even in the Little House books (another series Carpan leaves out entirely!), where Ma and Pa are important characters, Laura's coming of age and her relationship with her sister Mary (and to a lesser extent Carrie) are just as important.
4. Also, insofar as there is one "model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists," it's obviously Jo March, because she's the ur-heroine of American girls' books in general and because Little Women is the first book in a series of either three or four books, depending whether you count Little Women and Good Wives separately.
5. Chapters 3 to 8 move chronologically through books from the 1920s to the 1980s. The analysis seems stronger - I got the sense that these are the books Carpan really cares about, not the ones she had to read to try to make her survey complete - but it could also just be that her analysis seems stronger to me because I'm not familiar with most of the books she writes about, so I can't knowledgeably disagree.
6. I SUPER disagreed with a lot of Carpan's choices once she reached the 1990s, not least of which is the fact that somewhere around the sixties and seventies she seems to have narrowed her focus from "books for girls" to "books for teenage girls" without quite seeming to notice. How else could you possibly justify the fact that she devotes one paragraph to the incredibly popular Babysitters Club series?
(Also, she dings BSC because "by promoting babysitting the series may encourage preteen and teen readers to focus on mothering as their primary goal in life" (123), which I think shows a complete failure to actually engage with the series, which is about entrepreneurship and friendship and developing your own individual strengths and talents as much as it is about babysitting, and also shows the shallowness of Carpan's intellectual framework for this book, which might without oversimplification be described as Marriage and Motherhood Bad, Sports and Careers Good.)
But then, Meg Cabot gets only a paragraph as well, and her series are definitely aimed at teenage girls, so who knows what's up with that.
There's also no mention at all of horse series (Heartland and Thoroughbred ought to fall in the teen-girl purview, even if Saddle Club and Pony Pals are too young), only brief mention of magic-themed series - Carpan mentions Cate Tiernan's Sweep but not Daughters of the Moon or Circle of Three - and for some reason a whole section devoted to Goosebumps and Fear Street, which insofar as they were gendered were marketed at boys.
