DEAR AMERICA: Standing in the Light

Oh, my precious. This is my favorite DA book ever. I'm pretty sure it was one of the first I ever read. It was the tenth book in the series and it's one of the few written by Mary Pope Osborne, who sadly only contributed one other DA book and one trilogy to the My America series.

Catharine became one of the main DA girls. She got one of the reissue books with a new cover design.

And long before that, she was one of the few who had a live action special and a Madame Alexander 18" doll.

Catharine is blonde in the book and on both book covers, but the actress chosen to play her sports red hair and the doll, which was based on the actress, has even darker red hair. I personally think the original cover picture is a little young-looking, but I like her blonde, so the updated illustration works better for me. She looks more like a 13-year-old there. On the other hand, the actress looks a bit old.

Standing in the Light is about a 13-year-old Quaker girl and her younger brother, who are both captured by the Lenape in 1763/1764. Catharine, horribly upset especially because she's been separated from her brother, initially holds back and takes out her anger by just babbling away angrily whenever she's around the Lenape. However, one of them, Snow Hunter, is a captive himself. He's 17 now and thinks of himself as Lenape, not English. So he's understood every angry word she's said. He takes her to see her brother, after she dreams that he's sick, and she's able to bring him back to their camp. Gradually, Catharine grows to respect the Lenape and enjoy some of their ways. She and Snow Hunter fall in love, which you'd think would come across kind of creepy, but when you're reading this book, it's easy to fall into their time and a 13-year-old marrying a 17-year-old is pretty preferable to a lot of the ages a 13-year-old could be married off to! Sadly, right after they express interest in their somewhat timid ways, Snow Hunter goes off hunting and never comes back. The English have come and the final pages of the book are quite hard to get through. Poor Catharine sees her adoptive mother injured, possibly fatally, and she's just an old woman. She doesn't know what happened to her Lenape sister or nephew. She still doesn't know what's happened to Snow Hunter. And she and her brother get dragged back into the white world. She suffers greatly trying to readjust and finally gives her diary to her father to read. He understands her, though many others do not. The unlikeable mother character pretty much can't bear it, because oh, it's so horrible that Catharine not only lived but didn't hate every single fucking moment of her captive life. I was glad to read in the epilogue that the mother dies the next year.

The Madame Alexander Catharine and Mem dolls

Catharine never marries and both she and her brother go on to do good works, inspired by what they learned during their captivity. Thomas, the brother, eventually learns about John McCloud (Snow Hunter) and the final line of the epilogue reveals that he was killed by soldiers in 1674, the year Caty was captive.

Standing in the Light is a sad book, but it's also very well-written and the characters come alive and make you care about them. This brief romance is one of my favorite written romances ever, and I recommend this DA book over any other. It's simpler writing than a lot of the others in the series, but the story is also far, far better.