DEAR AMERICA: Chicago Fire

I have a love/massively hate relationship with this book. I like the author's writing style and Pringle is an interesting character with a voice that's easy to like, but the drama level in this thing is off the charts.

SPOILER WARNING

Pringle's parents are killed in a carriage accident. She's brought home from her boarding school by her uncle, only to endure physical abuse from her aunt and have to watch her brother Gideon, who has Down's syndrome, get hit, too. One of her only respites is the time she spends with "Rabbit" (there's a lot of Alice in Wonderland in this thing), a young miner. Things come to a head in the house and she takes some money from her father's hiding place and runs away to Chicago with her brother. While on the journey, she befriends a young mother with three children, and then there's a train accident. She gets to Chicago only to learn that the friend of her mother's she was planning on staying with was committed to an asylum by her asshole father. She goes to the family she met on the train and becomes their nursemaid. Blah blah blah, the mother's brother is coming and it's all they can talk about. Who does it turn out to be but Pringle's "Rabbit?" Only her younger brother is terrified of him. Well, the huge twist to the book is that Rabbit was one of the miners who caused the carriage accident. Pringle flies at him, calling him a murderer, and of course, her loyal friend is suddenly not so loyal. Even though her brother committed a crime, she has zero sympathy for the girl she's taken in for all this time.

So Pringle runs off to look for her brother and hey, it's the great fire. He ends up being alive but the asshole family's house is destroyed. Yay. She never sees any of them again, so who knows if they lived or not? Apparently, we're not even supposed to care about the children.

The epilogue is minorly satisfying, because when she comes of age for her inheritance, she kicks the abusive aunt out of the house and the uncle's dead already.

Seriously though, this thing has enough drama to be a soap opera. It's a children's historical novel! Did we really need the mom's old friend to be in an asylum? Did we need the train accident? And what are the odds that this random woman she meets on the train is her weird crush's sister? Weird crush who's been, like, stalking the daughter of the people he killed and kissing her. That's so creepy. And I always get pissed that the bitch turns so quickly on Pringle to support her killer brother.

This book gives me a lot of angry feelings. I don't like nasty characters to not get a solid comeuppance. Some of these concepts are also way more adult than the target audience should be reading. Although now that I look at what else the author contributed, it's the one about the coal miner's bride, the teenage Polish girl who comes to America, and becomes the only Dear America diary writer to have sex. So I'm not really surprised.

I really don't recommend this one. The whole story is rushed. It's one flashback after another. It's one overly dramatic incident after another. It does suck you in, I'll give it that, but the ending is such a suckerpunch that it ruins any good the book created. It's also barely historical. It's just kind of a mess.

Except for Gideon. Gideon is an excellent character and I love him.

MY NAME IS AMERICA/DEAR AMERICA: Railroad Race

The transcontinental railroad is the subject of both My Name Is America and Dear America books. Both tell similar stories about the race between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific in their battle during the construction of the railroad.

I felt the My Name Is America book was stronger, because this is a tale better told by a male character. The Dear America was all right, but quickly turned into a love story and was more about family issues than anything involving the railroad. There have been great DA books with stories told from the female perspective, but in this case, when the subject is building a railroad, it works better as the journal of a boy that's doing all these various jobs, not someone who's just travelling along while her father writes a newspaper about everything.

So if you just want one book on the subject, read the My Name Is America one. The Dear America isn't bad, but it's not the better story for this subject.

DEAR CANADA: Confederation

While I liked this book, I think it's fair to say that it's not particularly historical. Rosie talks about the confederation issues and you learn some of what's going on, but I bet all that info condensed would only take up a couple pages.

Really, this book is the diary of a young maidservant who got forced to take her older sister's place, because the family was moving from Quebec City to Ottawa and the older sister wanted to stay in Quebec City and get married. She bumbles around a bit, because she has a tendency to be clumsy when her mind is on something more important than her work. The manservant of the family hates her for a reason that's never explained. She hangs around with the Irish boy who delivers water to the house and the French boy who does something else. I don't even remember what. She eventually meets a fellow maidservant and they hang out sometimes. The French boy brings her a kitty. The mistress of the house almost dies while she's pregnant, but recovers and the baby isn't affected by her illness. She has the baby and a nursemaid is brought in. There's a carriage accident and shortly following, Rosie is told about a missing expensive bracelet. The nasty manservant thinks she took it. She's hurt by all this and eventually, it gets to be so much that she plans to leave, but changes her mind. The Irish boy yells at her for this and they seem to come to a bit of a understanding about the future. The family tells her they would never think it was her and yes, she's moving with them to the new house they're building. In the epilogue, we learn that the bracelet was found in the carriage by the manservant, so he's forced to apologize, but in the follow-up Christmas story, he's still an asshole. I enjoyed the Christmas story, because Rosie finally got made the nursemaid.

It's a good book. It's just not quite up to Dear America/Canada standards for the historical content.

DEAR AMERICA: A Freed Girl

This book is sadly the author's only contribution to a Dear America series. I wish she'd written more, because this one is excellent.

It tells the story of Patsy, a freed girl on a plantation in South Carolina, who secretly learned to read and write alongside her master's children.

Patsy and everyone on the plantation are freed very early on in the story and instead of leaving, we get the story of the people who decided to stay behind and accept wages, land and schooling in exchange for their work.

Patsy is lame and has a stutter, so she doesn't have much self-confidence, and it's nice to see her grow as a character. She takes on more and more duties as others leave and eventually becomes the freed children's teacher when no one ever comes to take the job.

Patsy is a very likeable character and she writes in a manner that is easy to relate to. She has certain patterns to her writing, as some people do. I find myself overusing certain words and have to go back and edit my writing a lot, but handwriting in ink, Patsy wouldn't be able to do that, so you can see which phrases she repeats often and the style of her jokes. She's a very realistic character.

I highly recommend this one and I'm glad it was part of the reissue.

DEAR AMERICA: Back to the Civil War

If you can stand reading about the Civil War from the perspective of a massively spoiled Southern girl, then this book is for you. Bear in mind, you'll run into several very racist sentiments, mostly from a neighbor and the girl's father.

Emma is an extremely shallow character and I have a hard time caring about any Southerners who faced hard times during the Civil War, because the sucky things the Yankees may have done were flanked with racist crap from the Southerners.

I suppose it's good to tell both sides of the story, but that doesn't mean I enjoy putting down a book with the sense that the main character never learned that slavery and white supremacy are wrong.

This one sadly got picked for the reissue, although I do find it amusing that this fancy girl got saddled with some very sedate cover art for the new version.

Emma was one of the dolls in the second set of Dear America characters that would have been produced by Madame Alexander if the line continued. Naturally, she's in a giant frou frou dress that only appeared in one scene in the book and her hair's all fancy. I find it pretty poor that whoever designed these catalog images thought it okay to stick the slave-owning character next to the slave character. Come on, Madame Alexander. Really? I'd give it a semi-okay if they were shown in chronological order, but they're not. Tzipporah, who is the latest chronologically, is shown on the far left, next to Sarah Nita, then Emma and Clotee. Chronologically, it would have been Clotee, Sarah Nita, Emma and Tzipporah, which would have been much better.

Anyway. On to the next book.

DEAR AMERICA: Navajo Girl

Books covering the poor treatment of Native Americans are always hard for me to read and this one is no different. It's written in an excellent manner with Sarah Nita telling her granddaughter to write down the story of what happened to her and her family in 1863.

Sarah Nita and her little sister are off tending the sheep when soldiers raid their home and march their family away. The girls spend days fleeing with only their dog for protection to a canyon, where others are known to live. They meet a new family and remain there for awhile, but it's only a matter of time before the soldiers find them, too. Then begins the Long Walk down to Fort Sumner, where thankfully, Sarah Nita is reunited with her parents. They spend four long years there, then are allowed to return home.

The book is well-written and you can tell by her page of thanks that the author had knowledgeable help in the writing of the book.

ETA: I completely forgot to add the picture of the prototype Sarah Nita doll! She was one of the sadly unproduced set of four.

MY AMERICA: Civil War

Of course the Civil War had to be one of the few topics tackled by the My America series for younger readers.

Virginia's is a very odd series and almost so unrealistic that it doesn't work.

In the first book, she's living in Gettysburg, waiting for her father and older brother to return from outside town, where they went to help her uncle hide his horses from the Confederates.

Virginia is left with the local reverend's wife while he's also out of town and the new school teacher is also living there. The teacher asks about Virginia's brother a lot, which annoys her.

As the battle rolls closer and closer, Virginia just runs off whenever she wants and does whatever she wants. She repeatedly goes back to her home alone without the reverend's wife even really noticing, because she's obsessively baking bread as a coping mechanism. Finally, after the battle, she's had enough waiting and returns home to pack a satchel, intending to look for her father and brother on her own, when her dad shows up. Apparently, the brother should have been back two weeks ago, so they go out looking for him and eventually find him with a broken leg. He'd been captured by the Rebels.

Her brother of course manages to like the teacher chick enough to propose, so they get married, but this is one of the most unrealistic parts, because they barely know each other, so it irritates me.

So everyone's all together again and they decide to up and move to Washington City (pre-DC).

In After the Rain, the family has just moved and everyone is struggling with work. The teacher is knocked up and useless because she's pregnancy sick all the time. The older brother can't get a reporting job that someone promised him, so he starts out as a typesetter. The father can't find work playing the violin, so he tries woodcutting, only to hurt himself and render himself useless. So it's up to the little girl to find a cushy job as a maid and make five bucks a week that helps the family make it.

Yeah, see, unrealistic. These are younger than DA, too, so she's like ten.

There's a lot of her being envious of her employer's grandkids, but she gets over it, and eventually the brother becomes a reporter and the father gets hired by Ford's Theatre. You see where that's gonna go. The book ends with the assassination and the teacher giving birth. The baby is of course named Abraham Lincoln.

In the third book, the family randomly decided to move to New York City. Ford's is closed down and I guess there's nowhere else for the father to find work, so his old boss suggests NYC and off they go.

The brother's a reporter right away this time, but once again, his wife is kinda useless, as she's getting over her delivery and doesn't do much except eventually start to tutor Virginia. The father struggles with finding work again and decided to give violin lessons, which he used to do. That ends up working out for him, because he meets a well off widow and you know what happens there.

Virginia develops an interest in the theatre and becomes a dresser for awhile, only to have her feelings hurt when she overhears one of the company call her plain. But she ends the book with dreams of being a theatre director and giving herself the parts where the plain girl is discovered to actually be not plain at all. Whoopee.

When I got into my reread before, I learned that I was missing a few My Americas. I think this was one of them, because I have no recollection of this third book at all, although honestly, it's so dull and not historical that it's the most forgettable book I've read yet.

Virginia's trilogy is very unrealistic, rather dull and doesn't connect with history much. Skip it unless you're a DA completist. I'm honestly super disappointed in it, because I don't remember it being this bad and it's written by the author of Standing in the Light, which is my favorite DA. I'm not sure how this series went so off the rails for Osborne, but it sure did.

DEAR CANADA: Underground Railroad

This book was a little break from the Civil War, despite still being set during it. The war gets very little mention though and its biggest connection to Julia May is that her older brother leaves Canada to fight.

The story follows Julia May and her parents, older brother and younger brother, as they travel to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Once there, they stop in Toronto for awhile, then move on further north.

If you're looking for major historical events, this isn't the right book in the series for you. It's very much a slice of life book with very few historical incidents. Julia May and her family finally are free, but they quickly learn that it's still hard to be anything but white even when you're not in the southern US and there are several incidents with no comeuppance for people that treat them unkindly.

  

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Civil War

The next two in the run of Civil War books come from the My Name Is America series.

Rufus Rowe is too weak to join the fighting, but he's on the southern side. Like the cover says, he's a witness to the battle of Fredericksburg.

I didn't find this one interesting and I was glad it was a quick read. The main friend Rufus makes in the book is a black slave, yet he doesn't seem to ever change his position on the war. His thoughts on slavery are barely covered, so I felt that a rather weak point, considering that's, you know, the main point of the war.

The author, Sid Hite, did not contribute any others to the series.

James Edmond Pease, on the other hand, writes an excellent camp record with illustrations and everything. His rise in rank (more than once) is an interesting story contrasted with his own fear and his struggles with self-doubt. He's a much more well-rounded character than some of the underdeveloped journal writers found in this series.

There are a couple uses of the N word if you're not comfortable with that. I don't like it, but of course, these are historical novels, so it's to be expected.

Jim Murphy contributed 2 Dear Americas and 3 My Name Is Americas to the series.

Up next is a Dear Canada about the Underground Railroad, so we've got a bit of a break from the fighting.

DEAR CANADA: Gold Rush

And we're back on the trail again, only this time with more pretending to be a boy action.

Harriet's father headed out to participate in the gold rush, leaving behind his pregnant wife, two daughters and a son. Harriet's mom dies of childbirth fever a few weeks after the baby and she's at the mercy of the people in the fort. One is a family that wants to take her younger sister and brother, but not her and the bitchy wife's reasoning is basically because she's ugly.

Harriet disguises herself as a boy and goes along with a group of men (and one woman) to gold rush territory, so she can find her father.

It's a somewhat boring journey, but it is different than the other trips thanks to what Harriet goes through as a "boy." Thankfully, the book is pretty short and after many more adventures off the trail, Harriet is finally reunited with her dad. In the epilogue, he sails back to get the two younger children and everyone lives a pretty happy life.

I think this is a better trail book than some of the ones overly laden with drama and sorrow, but I'm just so tired of trails still!

DEAR AMERICA: Civil War Round 1

My plan for these big topics is to lump all the books together as much as I can, but due to my need to read the books chronologically, that gets thrown off. The next one is a Dear Canada about the gold rush set in 1862, so I figured I'd review this one first, then the Dear Canada, then start lumping the Civl War ones together, although glancing down the titles, it's going to be a broken up series of entries anyway!

It's been months since I've done a Dear America. I took a break from them to try to get through some of my other piles of books, but I'm itching for some historical, so I'd like to get all these done. Although I'm sure I'll still be taking breaks along the way. I do intend to finish the most recent Goddess Girls book and review it soon, but it's good and I want to drag it out a bit.

Amelia has a lot on her plate. This book isn't about the Civil War so much as how it affected her family as it started up. Amelia's father is an assistant lighthouse keeper on an island and Amelia does about a third of the lighthouse work. Her mother suffers from I believe arthritis and who even knows what else. She's a wreck. The mother and grandmother are rather nasty pro-slavery characters, while the father is on the side of abolition, but he's not a great character either, as he's very distant and only comes around at the end. So at home, Amelia has her lighthouse duties and basic household duties, since her mother is useless 90% of the time. She also rows into town and goes to school, but also teaches younger kids, helps her grandmother and visits her uncle, who runs a shop in town. Her uncle's the smart one in the family, an abolitionist whose wife is a former slave.

Early on in the book, Amelia loses her prospective love interest to an accident, but his brother steps up later on.

The book is like half weather reports and half annoying family drama with a smidge of "oh, hey, the Civil War" thrown in. No wonder I put it down and strayed from DA for so long! And yet it was one of the ones chosen for the new cover reissue. Who knows? Maybe others liked it more than I did. It's a very light beginning to the heavier Civil War stuff to come.

And now, the Gold Rush. Even after such a long break, I cannot escape these trail books!

GODDESS GIRLS 21

I have been terribly lazy about my reviews, because I keep getting so distracted by other things! Pallas the Pal has been sitting in my book pile since December when it came out.

Pallas the Pal alternates chapters between Pallas and Athena. Pallas is Athena's old friend from the very first Goddess Girls book. Athena lived with her family before being summoned to MOA and learning she was a goddessgirl.

Each girl has specific struggles to overcome. Pallas misses her old friend and wonders why she hasn't written her lately. She's also on the "Cheer Blades" team for her school, a sport that combines sword-fighting and cheering sort of. She's part of two sword events throughout the book. Athena meanwhile has a surprise baby sister, Hebe. Hebe has a very magical birth, so it's not like Athena had the normal nine months to get in the big sister mindset, so she's dealing with a case of sibling rivalry. And both girls are a bit jealous of the other's new friends and take awhile to figure out how to move forward in their friendship.

Add in the fountain that Hebe appeared in turning out to be the Fountain of Youth and causing all the grown-ups to act like children, and Pallas and her friend Eurynome being trained for the big sword-fighting competition by Achilles and Agamemnon and you've got a book jam-packed with stuff.

I'm never really happy with how the books treat the Trojan War characters. I think Athena's Hero-ology Odysseus was an adult, but Achilles and Agamemnon are both kids. And Achilles is definitely the one from the war, because that's acknowledged, so it's odd that he's a) young and b) alive.

But the first rule of Goddess Girls is to forget everything you know about Greek mythology. It's kind of odd, but I really do try not to think about it. I just get hung up on wondering how their decision-making process works though, because so many adults are seemingly arbitrarily kids.

Eurynome is an odd choice for Pallas's best friend's name. Eurynome is multiple figures in mythology, but none of them are anything like the one from this book.

The story of Pallas and Athena is actually mirrored fairly well in the book. Pallas is a daughter of Triton, which is reflected in the story by her town being called Triton. Both girls were raised together. And the story of Pallas fighting Athena in a friendly battle and Zeus interfering with the Aegis is also myth accurate. Except that Pallas was killed in the real myth, but obviously, that's not gonna happen here. They even have a bit in the book about Athena and the palladium, which is nice.

Pallas the Pal is a solid book in the Goddess Girls series. There are a lot of good characters and mythological nods. I feel it's almost got a little too much. I think they could have eliminated the silly Fountain of Youth plotline entirely and had an even tighter story. It's not one of my faves, but it is quite good.