THE NANCY DREW NOTEBOOKS #61 SPACE CASE!

Confession: Sometimes when I’m weeding books I read the last few pages of the book because once I know the plot I need to know what happens. And if I’m not going to read the whole book (because I’m like that) then I read the last few pages.

So the grocery store in Nancy’s neighborhood is having a contest to see who can guess the number of jelly beans in the jar and winner goes to space camp with friends.

(warning: the rest of this rant is spoilery so skip over if you care about the twist ending of THE NANCY DREW NOTEBOOKS #61 SPACE CASE!)

The boys buy a jar exactly the same size as the one the store is using and fill it with jelly beans and count them. And then brag about it on stage after winning for guessing exactly the right amount. And then get disqualified because they didn’t GUESS, they FIGURED IT OUT.

Lets ignore for a moment the fact that they shouldn’t have gotten it right on the nose (jelly beans settle differently, there’s always one or two malformed ones that may or may not count, etc.) and focus on what I think is a grave injustice. Yes what the boys did wasn’t necessarily in the spirit of the contest … but was it cheating? Was it worthy of being disqualified for? Is it really that much different than counting the amount of JBs on the bottom of the jar, counting how many deep JBs are going down the edge, and multiplying? Because that’s what I always did when I was little.

I dunno - I think that Nancy Drew winning in the end was kindof a cop out.