WWII: Part 1

I'm faced with a buttload of World War II books. I was going to try to read through a few more before my first write-up, but the last one I read annoyed me, so I'm just doing these four for now.

The WWII section of the Dear America series and its spinoffs begins with a "Special Edition" by Barry Denenberg. There's nothing about this book that really makes it a special edition and I can't remember if any others ever were. It's well-written, but the first half takes place in Vienna and Julie's Jewish, so you're in for some hard to read stuff. The epilogue is also hard to read. Very good, very important story, but definitely hard to read.

Dear Canada's first WWII book is much more light-hearted. It's practically not about the war at all. The family takes in an English War Guest child and their neighbors get her brother, so there's some detail about the Blitz, but it's not like they're actually taking part in it. The older brother goes into the...navy, I think? It's been a bit since I finished this. So there's the worrying about a relative aspect, but a lot of this is just daily life stuff. It's not bad, just not that involved.

Gonna be honest and admit that I just skimmed this. Sometimes I'm in the mood for war stuff, and this time I wasn't. The boy war books just don't interest me. Argh. The Dear America ones tend to be better, but I Am Canada just seems really repetitive and, as I've mentioned before, formulaic. And there are four more of them in the series and every single one is WWII. I should force myself to read the others. I think two of them are ones I never even read, but I know I've read this one before.

And this one. This is the book that annoyed me so much that I had to get these reviews done.

This is Barry Denenberg again, but this time he fails horribly. He's got engaging, interesting characters, but the book is quite simply TOO SHORT. Not enough time is spent with them, events are covered far too briefly, some things aren't explained and all, and worst of all, the epilogue is pathetic and gives only the barest info about three of the characters. Not even the entire family!

I feel like Denenberg bit off more than he could chew. He was producing a book a year for these series and I'm thinking there were some he rushed through. In 1996, he did the Civil War, then the Irish mill girl (another short one) in 1997. In September 1998, he did the Revolutionary War, followed by the Japanese internment camp in 1999, Julie's diary in 2000 and then this Pearl Harbor one in 2001. I think this was his last gasp and it suffered really terribly for it. Thankfully, the one after was the blind girl and hers was good. I just wish he'd put much more thought into this book and realized how bad the epilogue in particular was. It's like he just didn't care about the characters he created and didn't think that maybe his readers might!