Well, I just read my first Hardy Boys mystery. (I’m 53 years old). I have a handful of the blue, hard cover editions that I got from my grandmother’s collection. She picked them up at yard sales and thrift shops years ago and gave some of them to me. I would have read the first story if I had it but my little collection begins with #2.

I remember being very familiar with the Hardy Boys when I was growing up. All the boys were reading them and the girls were reading Nancy Drew and I was never super interested in reading either one. I did enjoy watching Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy PLAY the Hardy boys on TV though. They were so cute.

I have found as an adult that it’s difficult to enjoy some books that were intended for a much younger audience. This is not always the case. I will always love Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and some of the Narnia books to name a few. And there are some picture books that I absolutely ADORE and want to share with everyone. But most of the time it is hard for me to spend time reading a chapter book intended for a juvenile audience. What should take me no time to complete takes me much longer because of my lack of interest. The House on the Cliff was sort of like that for me.

Frank and Joe Hardy are brave and curious young men who enjoy helping their detective father solve cases. In The House on the Cliff, they are investigating drug smugglers. The boys encounter trouble when their father goes missing and the they venture out on their own to find him. There is a mysterious house on a cliff by the ocean, secret passageways, trap doors, hidden ponds and scoundrels waiting out on the water. They enlist the help of their high school buddies, (thank goodness summer break has just begun), and the Coast Guard gets involved too. All’s well that ends well, thanks to Pretzel Pete.

Would I read another Hardy Boys mystery? Yes. It’s nice to have something like it to cleanse my palate when I have just come off of Reading Don Quixote for two months. I loved DQ by the way, it was just a big reading project to complete. I like to strategically include books like this into my reading challenges because I am a slow reader and it’s good to boost my reading numbers when they are lagging. In this case, I am reading it for Roof Beam Reader’s TBR Challenge and it fits very nicely. I doubt that they will ever be page-turners for me, though. Not just because they are juvenile, but also because I don’t really love mysteries.

Up next for the challenge: The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles