Book Review: Donna Parker

Book Review: Donna Parker Special Agent and sequels

Author: Marcia Martin

Date: 1957

Publisher: Whitman

ISBN: none

Length: 282 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Jon Nielsen

Quote: “I haven’t even walked into the school yet, and my problems are beginning already.”

Donna Parker was the heroine of six mystery novels for children. On the assumption that children like to read stories whose characters are a few years older than they are, the stories were written on a fourth or fifth grade reading level. In volume one Donna and Ricky, her best girl friend, enter grade nine. The series spans a year or two of adventures, all of which are similar enough to be reviewed at once (I’m selling the books as a set).

The whole series was a real period piece. In Donna Parker Special Agent, the Cold War was at its icy depth; paranoia about spies was everywhere. A boy at school sees that his blueprint for a model plane has been tampered with and, before even suspecting that another kid might have wanted to build a similar model plane, begins to suspect that the new janitor at school might be a spy. Donna and Ricky will of course find out who the janitor is...but I won’t spoil the story here.

Instead I’ll ramble on about the delicious 1950s touches, like those little white gloves the girls wear even when it’s not cold enough to bother with jackets. There’s a socioeconomic history behind those images. Before running water was widely available, educated people had started wearing gloves everywhere to keep the germs off their hands. A glove industry developed. By the 1930s, most North Americans were happily discarding their white cloth gloves, which were a considerable expense and nuisance. The glove industry was threatened, and the fashion industry came to the rescue. Back then “real ladies,” even in America, were supposed to take some interest in alleviating other people’s poverty, so even into the 1960s, if you were a “real lady” or the daughter of one, you would wear those silly little gloves. Men weren’t expected to go back to wearing gloves everywhere, but women were. Without the white gloves, a well-to-do female would have looked, not avant-garde, but selfish and mean...my mother still recalls being openly ridiculed by other women because, on a hot day in California, she wasn’t wearing gloves! White gloves were even part of Girl Scout uniforms, after age twelve. So on the cover of this book clean-faced, flat-chested Donna wears only a light jacket, but she wears white gloves.

The Donna Parker books were meant to be bestsellers for a few years and then become obscure collectibles, so they’re as indelibly date-stamped as today’s paperback TV tie-ins. They can be used as guides to 1950s fashions in clothes and decor, as long as you remember that 1950s fashions included some options; Donna Parker’s look was meant to tell us something about the Parkers’ socioeconomic level (affluent), their politics (conservative), and Donna’s image at school (wholesome, cheerful, reasonably popular). If your goal is to set a scene for characters who really did like Ike and exhorted kids to “Be Straight! Be Square!”, by all means let Nielsen’s illustrations inspire you.