When I was 10 or 11, my mom took me across the country to meet her parents for the first time. (They weren’t estranged, just just geographically separated.) Her childhood room was more or less intact, but being used for storage. And it was a treasure trove of stuff- I think I got to know Mom better in that one week than I had (or have) ever in my entire life.
Among the treasures were my mom’s childhood books. You could tell which ones were her favorites because they were tattered and dog-eared to the point of disintegration. And the rattiest, worst conditioned ones were an entire set of Trixie Beldin mysteries. For those who haven’t read them, these were from the same sort of pseudo-author as the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. “Kathryn Kenny” was actually a rotating roster of authors who were edited and published under the same *nom de plume*. I think there might have been one or two other series on her shelf as well, but I can’t recall their names.
We took most of her books home with us (and a bunch of other stuff), and I spent a couple of years where the Trixie Beldin mysteries were my absolute favorite reads. Trixie was a tween detective and founding member of the “Bob-White Club” (named after a type of quail) composed of local kids her age, one of whom was a slightly older boy named Jim Frayne.
First of all, I wanted to *BE* Trixie. She was smart, sassy, and she solved mysteries with a combination of moxie and determination. She was cute, with a mop of blonde curls that wouldn’t behave. She got to go on cool adventures with her club mates (some of whom were rich). And best of all, she had Jim. Jim was handsome, kind, intelligent, and an all-around stand-up kind of guy. A real gentleman.
As the series progressed and the characters transitioned into teenagers, Jim and Trixie became a couple (with varying degrees of “official coupledom”). And because Trixie was (in my head) a sort of alter-ego for me, I became kind of enamored of Jim as well. There was a short period during which I did all sorts of “Trixie” types of things, like writing “Mrs. Jim Frayne” on a notebook page (because she did that in one of the books). I put little color-coded tabs on every book that had even a slightly romantic scene, and made tiny angry dog faces scribbles next to paragraphs where Trixie did or said something stupid that made Jim sad or angry (usually because Trixie had done something dangerous, and he feared for her safety).
I re-read the gushy parts over and over. I made really awful attempts at what was essentially fan-fic, although I didn’t think of it that way. Just pages of what I thought *should have happened* in spiral notebooks (sadly lost to time). I actually learned how to draw (human) faces for no other reason than that I wanted to have a real picture of how I imagined Jim to look.
Like all childhood crushes, my infatuation Jim Frayne eventually faded. But for a time, I was genuinely and intensely crushing on someone who existed only on the pages of a couple of shelves of aging, tattered juvenile novels. If you had asked tween/teen me if she was in love with Jim, she would have unequivocally answered “yes,” and if given the magical ability to leap into the books and take over the character of of Trixie Beldin, she wouldn’t have hesitated a single second. (today-me might even be tempted, if the genie in charge of book-leaping could get the ages aligned right!)
Anyway, I wrote this because I doubt I am the first person who spent part of her teenage years crushing hard on a character in a book. I have no idea if was a healthy thing to do, or if it was the first step on the path to some kind of psychosis. But these are some of my fondest memories from that time in my life.
tl;dr: Fell in love with a character from a book when I was a tween/teen. Thought I’d share a little.
by magsnotmaggie