Revisiting Nancy Drew Diaries #1 and #2

I read and reviewed the first two Nancy Drew Diaries books over a year ago in "Nancy Drew Diaries Series."  Please read that post for my original thoughts.  On this reading, I was able to do what I could not do last year:  compare the new Diaries series to the Girl Detective series.

In Nancy Drew Diaries #1, Curse of the Arctic Star, Nancy investigates who is behind acts of sabotage on a cruise ship.  Bess has a boyfriend, Alan, who travels on the cruise with Nancy, Bess, and George.

Nancy does not appear to be clumsy in this book.  She seems more interested in clothes than she was in the Girl Detective series, as evidenced on page 2.  Nancy says that River Heights is "catatonic" on page 6.  She thought that River Heights was pretty exciting in the Girl Detective series, and it was!

George may still be into technology to some degree.  George loves free things, as in free anything.  George loves to eat.  She eats and eats massive quantities of food and doesn't gain weight.  This is very strange.

I find both Bess and George to be annoying in the first two books.  George comes across as a very disagreeable bumbling fool.

On page 132, George mentions a zip line accident that occurred in Costa Rica, and this did happen in Nancy Drew Girl Detective #40 Green with Envy.  This means that the Nancy Drew Diaries series is set in the same universe as the Girl Detective series, so we can conclude that all of those events are relevant to this series. 

This book and the second book have the same story arc.  This is similar to the trilogies at the end of the Girl Detective series.  Nancy finds the culprit of this book but realizes at the end that there must be another culprit.

In Nancy Drew Diaries #2, Strangers on a Train, Nancy, Bess, George, and Alan are still on the cruise.  Nancy continues to investigate who is responsible for all the sabotage.

These books are like the trilogies from the Girl Detective series.  This story must have been originally intended to be a Girl Detective trilogy book and was adapted for this new series.  I shudder to think of how this story would have developed if it had been stretched into three books.

While I enjoyed these two stories, Bess, George, and Alan are all very annoying, so that reduced my enjoyment greatly.  The characterizations are quite off.  I see these first two books as transitional books from what was the Girl Detective series to what will be the Diaries series.