During the summers of my tween years, growing up around an Air Force Base, my mother took us to swim practice, then breakfast, then to the library, until we began volunteering at the Red Cross. We spent hours at the Base library, which was quite small, but my brother and I made good use of the books available. While my mother leafed through recipe books, and other "purposeful" kinds of texts, I must have read every Boxcar Children book that the library had during that time. No one ever told me that reading these books was a waste of time, so I read to my heart's content. I remember how I would become so compelled by the mysteries in the books, that I couldn't put them down until I finished them. The clues and details the author included kept me interested in what would happen next. I still remember Benny's pick chipped cup and how Jessie or Violet used an old bottle to roll a pie crust to go with the apples they found.
The freedom that the orphaned children had parallels Nancy Drew's freedom to drive her car to solve mysteries. I admired the children's resourcefulness in reconfiguring the boxcar into a suitable place to live temporarily, and furnishing it with necessary items retrieved from the nearby dump. Their resourcefulness also transferred in their success in solving mysteries. I remember feeling engaged in the story especially when the children thought to search inside of old, secret places for clues. I probably wished that I had such interesting mysteries to solve.
These books seemed to be a primer for Nancy Drew stories, which I don't remember reading as a child because I didn't read as much, just for fun, after I started volunteering at the Red Cross.
