Bobbsey Twins

The Bobbsey Twins are the principal characters of what was, for 75 years, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's longest-running series of American children's novels, written under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope.

The second part of the summer is chronicled in The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore, which is written as a direct sequel to the previous book, tying up some plot threads.

The fourth book, The Bobbsey Twins at School, begins the next autumn, with Nan and Bert "nearly nine years old" and Freddie and Flossie "almost five."

The earliest Bobbsey books were mainly episodic strings of adventures; with the growing popularity of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, detective plots began to dominate the series.

While many of the early volumes were constructed from whole cloth, with little or no connection to the real world, by 1917 (The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City, vol.

64), real places were depicted in meticulous detail, down to the names of well-known hotels and restaurants (and, in that particular case, the color of Colonial Williamsburg shuttle buses).

[3] In her book The Rhetoric of Character in Children's Literature, Maria Nikolajeva refers to the twins as a "simple duplication of protagonists".

[4] Bobbie Ann Mason, in The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide, differs, agreeing the books afford the child-reader an opportunity to imagine "a union with someone just like her, but of the opposite sex", but arguing the distinction between boy-twin and girl-twin "makes a world of difference": Bert "acts out his manhood by winning contests and beating the town bully, Danny Rugg", while his twin Nan – throughout the series "too old for dolls and pranks, too young for boys and barred from their games" – spends most of her time in the books "wagging her finger at Freddie and appearing to enjoy it", acting as "mini-parent, non-child, serious-minded little manipulator".

In the series, the twins are given the full names of Amanda and Gilbert "Gil" and are respectively played by Aadila Dosani and Praneet Akilla.