Kay Tracey - Critical Assessment

Critical Assessment

While the Kay Tracey books were intended to be similar to the Nancy Drew series, Kay Tracey was never as popular a character as Nancy Drew. Various critics have attempted to explain how a series so superficially similar should have been so much less successful.

Some commentators have cited the stories themselves and the style in which they were written as a reason for the series' comparative lack of success. The series is written at a much more break-neck pace than other series books of the time; their style has been called "formula-writing at its most flaccid." Others have compared the series to comic books, arguing that the stories are "lurid, but too cartoonish to be frightening."

Others have pointed to the character of Kay Tracey herself. The character has been described as much less focused than Nancy Drew on rational detective methods. While a Nancy Drew mystery at least "tells readers that Nancy works by logical reasoning," Kay "lurches from coincidence to happenstance." Some call Kay a "Nancy Drew imposter." Anne Macleod and others argue that the series was less long-lasting than Nancy Drew, despite its superficial similarities, because "the stories fail to support the kind of authority and autonomy that Nancy enjoys without question." Kay lacks her own car, but must instead borrow her cousin Bill's, and her authority is "undercut by her clear identification as a schoolgirl." Kay lives with her mother, not her father; while Kay's mother does not interfere in Kay's mystery-solving, she "carries non-interventionism to the point of idiocy" and fails to provide the series with the cachet that Carson Drew provided for Nancy.

In general, however, critics often see Kay Tracey as simply one of a number of girls' series that are important because they provided girl readers with role models, particularly girls who grew up before third-wave feminism.