I AM AMERICA Part 2

 

I Am America is back with two new books. 

The first is about the earthquake and fire in 1906 San Francisco. Like Lily's book from the Girls Survive series, this is told from the Chinese-American perspective. It digs a little deeper than Lily's though as Han struggles with his identity as both Chinese and American. And the action and drama are far more than in Lily's book. I definitely liked this a lot better. 

The book is written in a regular format. No letters or diaries or anything like that. 

Now this is something new. We've read plenty about prejudice and racism in the US during periods of war, but never has the perspective come from an Indian immigrant. I was really excited about this one, but it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped. 

Margaret has an Indian (Sikh) father and a white mother. She struggles with being mixed race and with the fallout of her father having some involvement with a party trying to fight for India's independence from Britain. I wish the author had gone all out and just made her Indian. I'm guessing she wanted the mixed race aspect to stick her in a white school so she could have a white German friend who also struggled with prejudice? I'm not sure. 

The book covers a long time span and suffers for it. It's actually unfortunately boring. I hate to say that, but it needed to be at least twice as long and get into Margaret's head a lot better than it did. There are good bones here, but it needed a lot of fleshing out that never happened.