Customer Reviews

Secret at Shadow Ranch #5

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This review concerns the original 1931 edition. Nancy, Bess, George and Bess and George's cousin, Alice head west to spend the summer at a ranch in Arizona. Unfortunately, this is pretty much all that the book is about. The reader gets 203 pages of the girls' adventures during the numerous times that they are either lost in the wilderness or stuck there during storms. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. A feeble attempt to make the book interesting by adding a couple of mysteries, one concerning Alice and the other concerning an orphan girl being mistreated by her guardian, falls flat because the mysteries are just a sidenote to the escapades of Nancy and her friends. I didn't read the revised edition published in the 1960s; however, the stories are similar. The revised edition has an added mystery concerning a ghost horse which may make it more interesting, but typically the writing style used in the books published from the late 1950s on is so horrible that the books are just plain awful. So I don't have much faith that the revised edition is any good either. Only buy this dull book if you're looking to complete your set.

This particular Nancy Drew book is very good, wonderful for horse lovers also! It is about horses, and there is a ghost horse that has been walking around and Nancy is trying to find out why!

This story starts when Nancy and her "chums" visit an Arizona ranch. They meet a girl on the train whose father has disappeared. Once they reach Arizona, the find an orphan girl living in a remote cabin with a cruel guardian. And then people at Shadow Ranch report a ghost horse is running around at night. Could the three mysteries be related? Find out when you read THE SECRET AT SHADOW RANCH. Only Nancy Drew could solve this one - and you know she will! It's worth the extra money to buy this reprint instead of the 1960's version...this is the original text as it was in the 1930's.