It’s possible you remember me going to my parents’ house for Christmas 2005 and re-reading all my mom’s Cherry Ames books, ’50s novels about a girl who becomes a nurse and inadvertently solves little mysteries. (See the end of the 2005 reading list or the beginning of 2006 or search for Cherry Ames on this page.)

And then I got back to Chicago and went a little crazy on eBay buying up copies for myself. And then I found that the women who wrote Cherry Ames also wrote books about a flight attendant named Vicki Barr.

I don’t find them quite as enthralling as the Cherry Ames series (I say this one book in), but it could be because when I read Cherry Ames I am enthralled with all this childhood nostalgia and that’s just not present reading the Vicki books for the first time. But they’re still fun. Full of totally non-PC sexist garbage that can either make you mad (eh, why bother) or make you laugh (that’s my response), they’re almost pedantic. Were they written to be pseudo instructional books for girls on possible careers? Be a Nurse (in Ames’ case) / Flight Attendant (Barr) and Solve Mysteries! YAY! 🙂 Ha!