DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997                TAG: 9703060513

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

BIBLIOGRAPHY GIVES GIRLS PLENTY TO ADMIRE

I was reading The Message in the Hollow Oak, a 1935 Nancy Drew mystery, to my 9-year-old daughter Mattie the other night.

We had turned the corner on Chapter XIV, ``The Cellar Ghost,'' in which Nancy and her chums were investigating a sinister-looking Canadian cabin on Wellington Lake.

Suddenly they heard a ``loud, unearthly moan'' coming from the basement, and Nancy responded in her customarily plucky fashion.

``You don't know what might be down there,'' Bess whispered tensely. ``So why risk your life!''

``I'll be all right,'' Nancy maintained. . . ''

Courageously, Nancy lifted the trap-door and peered down into the dark cellar.

I asked Mattie why she liked this cliffhanger yarn by the pseudonymous Carolyn Keene.

``It's exciting,'' she said.

I asked her how she felt about the hero being a girl.

``It's unusual,'' she said.

Mattie was right.

Her favorite TV shows are ``Johnny Quest'' and ``Mighty Max.'' The titular protagonists are bright like she, active like she. But boys like somebody else.

So what does one do for a young daughter besides read her Nancy Drew?

Consult a copy of Great Books for Girls: More Than 600 Books to Inspire Today's Girls and Tomorrow's Women by Kathleen Odean (Ballantine, 421 pp., $12.95).

``In these books,'' writes Odean, ``girls are the ones slaying the dragons - sometimes literally, more often figuratively.''

They're problem solvers.

And they don't all look like batty-eyed Barbie dolls, either.

Here's Dido Twite of Joan Aiken's Nightbirds on Nantucket, thwarting a criminal plot on the offshore Massachusetts island. And Billie Wind of Jean Craighead George's The Talking Earth, prevailing alone over storm and fire in the Everglades. And Herculeah (whoa!) Jones of Betsy Byars' The Dark Stairs, helping her private-eye Mom solve the case of the long-lost body.

Great Books for Girls is neatly divided by category into Picture-Story Books, Folktales, and Books for Beginning, Middle and Older Readers from 2 through 14. There are useful Resources for Parents and an appendix of Recommended Out-of-Print Books. Organization prevails; Odean, after all, was once a school librarian.

One does, however, have to hearken to the feminist drumbeat a bit about the correctness of her list.

``Some readers would consider The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson to be about a strong girl,'' Odean intones. ``Yet Gilly's rough exterior is the result of the pain she feels about being a foster child whose mother deserted her. She is smart but ends up hurting herself with her clever ideas.

``This outstanding novel, which isn't included, seems to me to be more about sadness than strength.''

Pfui. Girls and boys - and women and men - ought to read everything Katherine Paterson ever wrote. Twice. We're reinforcing people here, Ms. Odean, not ideologies.

Nancy Drew fares no better. In Flying Too High, she's looking for the murderer of a woman in the naval fighter pilot program. It's 1991, and our star has traded in her roadster for an airplane:

``A feminist theme emerges as she sees the bias against women in the program; on the other hand, she is strongly attracted to a handsome, macho trainee.''

Oh, well.

Maybe he was just trying to impress her.

But when Nancy pales, Great Books for Girls remains a helpful place to begin the next leg of a lifelong journey.

Heroes help all of us to become what we admire. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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