‘Missing Millie Benson’: Ohio does Iowa a favor in Millie bio

In reading 'Missing Millie Benson,” you'll discover that the Iowan who brought Nancy Drew, girl detective, to life also lived her own life with a bit of spunk and derring-do.

In an era when few women went to college, Millie Augustine, the daughter of the Ladora town doctor, graduated from the University of Iowa in 1925 and, in 1927, became the first person to earn a master's degree in journalism from the UI.

She was twice married and twice widowed, writing some of her 130 books sitting at the bedside of a dying husband. She moved to Ohio and became a news reporter for the Toledo newspapers. She kept writing young adult books because she was supporting herself and her daughter. She learned to fly and earned her pilot's license at age 62.

The new book about Benson's life comes from Ohio University Press ($29 hardcover, $13 paperback, 136 pages) and is part of its Biographies for Young Readers series. It's a good format to tell the life of someone who spent so many hours creating stories for young

readers.

Author Julie Rubini has set up each of the books' 10 chapters with 'clues” as to who Millie Benson was. Each chapter has a short sidebar - about the first female pilots, George Gallup, the Edgar Awards - as well as a 'Did You Know?” paragraph that tells young readers about Rosie the Riveter, the Wright Brothers and Iowa City as a City of Literature.

The book also provides a helpful glossary of words young readers might not know, and boldfaces those words in the text to signal the vocabulary opportunity. The book has a good timeline of Millie's life, a strong bibliography and a complete list of the books Millie wrote.

Though this biography is written for young adults, there's plenty to interest adult readers, especially the successful, albeit formulaic, system Edward Stratemeyer used to create so many young adult series. Rubini also brings Millie's world to life, imagining the UI campus, for example, as it would have been in the 1920s.

It's great that Ohio University Press saw the potential in Millie's life story and that Rubini wanted to write such a competent, engaging biography about an Iowan whose story otherwise might never have been told.

Iowa City Book Festival organizers are hoping to have Rubini, and her book, at the 2016 festival this fall. The Ohio author, and her book about an intrepid Iowan, would be a perfect fit.