Book Review: The Vanishing Girl by Josephine Ruby

The Vanishing Girl

by Josephine Ruby (Hoopla Audiobook)

 

Ever since the original series “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” premiered in 1969, when I was a six-year-old addicted to Saturday morning cartoons, I’ve been a fan of the teenaged team of sleuths known as Mystery Inc., driving around in their day-glo van, solving mysteries around the country. Over 50+ years, these characters have gone through constant tweaking and modification, as the series has been reinvented in animated form for new audiences every few years. Live action feature films and TV-movies have added to the mix, with a 2019 computer-animated film, Scoob! being the latest addition.

 

The characters of Scooby Doo have also appeared in video games and comic books. But (as far as I can tell) never in traditional prose fiction…until now. The Vanishing Girl takes extreme liberties with the characters. This novel is a prequel to the kids’ well-known adventures, taking place when they knew each other, but before they all decided to team up and hit the road — in fact, they’re all still high school students (with the exception of Scooby, of course). This novel, and its sequel The Dark Deception, are focused primarily on brainiac Velma Dinkley and red-headed glamour girl Daphne Blake, with Shaggy Rogers and Fred Jones as relatively minor supporting characters. Despite their differing personalities, introverted and anti-social Velma and extroverted Daphne were good friends growing up, until some personal crises drove them apart and actually turned them into antagonists towards each other. Now, then snipe and yell at each other, saying nasty things and trying to get a rise. When Daphne’s replacement best friend disappears AND Velma’s mother loses her job, all over an apparent haunting at the theme park that tells Crystal Cove’s history, the former-friends, now-can-barely-stand-each-others must team up once again to find out the truth of what’s going on.

 

I have mixed feelings about this novel. As a Young Adult mystery, it’s not bad, featuring characters with complex relationships and a mystery that’s fun to see them solve. But as a novel featuring beloved characters with over fifty years of established tone and anticipated friendship, this novel really failed. Plus, the characterization and backgrounds established for both Fred and especially Shaggy don’t jibe with how those characters have been portrayed throughout their history. In part, that may be because this novel has them all as teenagers in the contemporary era, instead of the late 60s or early 70s that were created to inhabit, particularly Shaggy — who was originally patterned after the Beatnik character Maynard G. Krebs (from the TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) — setting him up as a relative well-to-do teen in the 2010s but having the same behavior quirks just doesn’t work! I think I would have preferred seeing Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Fred hew more closely to what fans would expect, rather than be so extremely divergent. None-the-less, there were moments when I saw my beloved old characters peek through the harder, edgier versions here, and that kept me going. So…there’s just enough traditional Scooby Doo elements to have me giving this one a 6 rating, with the hopes that future novels tone down the antipathy between Velma and Daphne. Fingers crossed!

[Note: Scott read this as a paperback, but the libraries currently only have it as a downloadable audiobook via our Hoopla resource.]

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try any of the many variations on the Scooby Doo characters on DVD in the libraries’ collection — either the animated series, or the live-action films.]

[ publisher’s official The Vanishing Girl web page ] | [ Note: “Josephine Ruby” is a pen-name for a female author, coined after “Joe Ruby”, who was co-creator of the Scooby Doo, Where Are You? television series and characters. ]

 

See Scott C.’s review of Scoob! in the November 2020 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

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