Mystery

Nancy's third grade class is doing a three-day Secret Santa exchange but when Nancy's gifts go missing on the first two days, she realizes she has to scurry to find the thief before her Christmas is completely ruined!

This is another edition to a series of Nancy Drew spinoffs in which Nancy is an elementary school-age student. The mysteries are therefore tamer and easier to solve. I saw this mystery's resolution coming from a mile away, including the smaller components of it, but I appreciate how Nancy tries to reason it out and refuses to do anything with proof.

The class's bizarre multi-day celebration of Christmas is the convolution needed to make the plot work and seems very dated even for its time period -- schools were already getting better then about not making one religious holiday the focus of everything. If you can suspend your disbelief, I suppose this makes for a fun holiday read.

The illustrations don't add much, but this book reads that much quicker with some full pages being nothing but a black-and-white drawing. Again, this series would be a good bridge between early readers and much longer chapter books if it wasn't so dated already. ( )