AMERICAN DIARIES Part 5

If you like standing in line, this is the book for you! Possibly the least exciting book in the entire series. Nell's mom's kind of a judgy asshole, so that's not fun. Her grandmother's become forgetful and sees her dead husband everywhere, making Nell worry that she'll be sent back to Ireland and Nell will have to go with her. Her little sister is beyond old enough to stand, but gets toted around everywhere. There's a bit of interesting stuff at the beginning, but then they stand in line to get off the ship, they stand in line in the freezing cold waiting for the ferry, they stand on the ferry waiting to get off at Ellis Island, then they stand around Ellis Island for all the inspections. It's boring. It's also sad because they introduced a nice man only to have him fucking freeze to death. Nice going, Duey. Apparently, that was the only way she felt she could liven up her story of Standing in Fucking Lines Forever. 

Thankfully, Francesca's got a much better story. She's from a wealthy DC family. The mom does a lot of charity work. And this is the only book where the subject is suffrage that I've ever actually quite liked. The characters are interesting and the story moves along at a good pace. Not much standing around in this one! 

Janey's another white girl's point of view of Pearl Harbor, so ho hum there, but she's accompanied for most of the book by Akiko, who lives across the street from her and is a Japanese girl her age. As for Pearl Harbor stories though, this feels too short. I wanted more details, but that's the problem of trying to make these books last only the span of one day.

Zellie finishes off the series. She's a free black girl whose grandmother just died, leaving her on her own at age twelve. She walks to another town and finds work in a boardinghouse for mill girls, but the woman running it wants her to spy on them. There's some pretty good intrigue in this one and Zellie's a very likeable character. I could have read a longer book about her. 

So that finishes off American Diaries. I'm going to switch back to My Story, though I'm not sure just when yet. I might work on something else first.

AMERICAN DIARIES Part 4

Josie's the WWII homefront girl. There's a theft on her farm, her older brother's acting weird and hasn't enlisted, and Josie spends far too much time trying to come up with something that will make her look awesome so people can see that their family contributed to the war effort after all.

This one's got a mystery, but that really doesn't make it any more interesting. It's just sort of blah.

Poor Rosa is being forced to audition for part after part by her mother, who's obsessed with making her a child star. The problem is she's too old to be a child star. After enduring getting a perm, Rosa successfully makes it through an audition and gets an extra role, which will help support her and her mother for another few weeks.

Her mother's a shitty character who's too afraid to audition herself and becomes Stage Momzilla because of that. She also constantly calls Rosa "sweeties," which drives me absolutely insane because it's a fucking plural word.

Rosa comes out on top in the end and learns what her true dream really is. She's a good character, but putting up with her mother was a strain that kept me from finishing this book for weeks.

This is the third pro-South Civil War book. Didn't Kathleen Duey get the concept of there being two sides to the Civil War?

Maddie isn't for slavery, but she comes from a family that owns slaves.

However, her entire book is spent selfishly trying to keep her horse out of Yankee hands as opposed to helping her mother and the others hide food so they don't all starve.

She helps out a wounded Yankee in the end and learns to be a little more selfless, but it's a little too late for me. She still reads as a spoiled brat.

Only four more of these to go! I figured I'd make this the section of three and the final section the remaining four, because I haven't completely forgotten Josie's plot yet. Although I do plan on knocking these other four out over the next couple days.

AMERICAN DIARIES Part 3

Celou's book is one of those where I can't find a great picture. She's way prettier in her art than this makes her look.

Celou is half French trapper and half Shoshone. Her father has journeyed away on some trapping thingy while her mother stays with Celou, the eldest, and her brothers who are 10 and an infant.

When some Crow come to cause trouble, it's up to Celou to save the day, which she does by using her brains. Celou's pretty damn awesome and this is a great book. Kaya would look up to Celou and her quick thinking and bravery.

Summer is possibly my favorite of these 19 girls. She's an indentured servant who's being wrongly accused of theft by the younger daughter of the house who used to be her close friend. Well, Summer's not having it and she spends the entire book trying to solve the mystery despite a lot of problems. She comes out well in the end, having proven what happened, her innocence and how the younger daughter set her up to take the blame for her own stupidity. She also comes away from the day determined to be successful when she finally finished her indenture and even save up money to buy the freedom of some of the household's slaves. She's awesome.

Agnes has the most unfortunate cover design. It says right in the beginning of the book that her hair is short and she does pincurls. Well, her hair on the cover is definitely not that. So it irritates me a lot.

Anyway, poor Agnes has a hell of a rough day. Her father steps on a nail and her mother has to take him to get it xrayed, so they're going to be gone until evening the next day.

Well, they run a dairy farm. Despite her mom telling her to dump the day's milk, Agnes figures out a way to milk all the cows, chill the milk, bottle it, crate it, get it all into the horse-drawn wagon, and deliver it with only herself and her two younger siblings doing the work.

Then her dad comes home while they're about to go on the morning run and he goes off about what they did wrong, not a word of thanks on them not losing the day's earnings. Agnes thankfully blows up at her father, blames him for her older brother running off because he never felt appreciated and essentially, with the help of her mom, forces him to thank all the kids for their hard work. He gets over it a bit by the end, but he's still a douche.

Amelina has the last of the first style of cover and she's a bit of a mystery, because I'm not sure this cover actually exists. On the copy I have, her art is different and the town is different.

Even the year is different. This one to the right says 1870, when the actual book is 1863 during the war.

See?

That's the cover I have down below, so something tells me Amelina's story got worked over, then they changed the cover to the new style with the new town and year. And bonnet style.

Amelina lives in a Cajun community and her life there is a bit interesting, although they don't go much into it. She's an orphan who lives with her widower uncle, who's gone a lot of the time, so even though she's young, she runs a household by herself and basically lives by herself.

Her adventure is coming across a wounded Union soldier and helping him survive, even defying her asshole uncle to do so. I was glad when they finally touched on the subject of slavery. The Cajuns there are against it. We already had a pro-South Civil War book and we really didn't need another. Although honestly, we've got another one coming up. Not one Northern girl during the Civil War but THREE Southern ones. At least this one's got her head on right. (And not one Asian girl, but all these stupid Civil War books. Ugh. So annoying.)

AMERICAN DIARIES Part 2

Oh, no, it's a trail book!

Actually, Willow's book is pretty good, mostly because I think the shortness of these books works in its favor this time. There's enough trail info, but the misery doesn't go on for pages and pages and pages.

Willow's father died during a river crossing, so most of the book is about trail life and her river fear. Her mother remarried and the stepfather is a little too strict for my liking. He's okay by the end, of course. Willow's younger sister got her foot crushed by the wagon and Willow's got a dog that needs constant minding. The only real fault with this one is that you're left wondering if they ever made it.

Ellen's one of my favorites from this series. Her book isn't incredibly interesting, because it gets a bit repetitive, but I think it tells the story well. Her father is away from their remote farm, leaving Ellen and her grandfather alone. Her grandfather ends up injuring himself and Ellen has to devise a way to get him back to the house, then fix the windmill he fell trying to fix, then find all the cows that got out when he left the dumb gate open, including her father's prized bull. It's a lot of her riding her horse back and forth, talking to the cat and, once he wakes up again, her grandfather. But it's a good, unusual adventure story. You don't see many female ranchers from the 1800s. Ellen's character is what makes this a really good book, not so much the story.

Alexia is one of my other big faves. Her father's dragging her all over the country with his schemes, but he seems to finally have found a decent job and they've lived in the same boarding house for a year. Alexia works with the designer/seamstress (called a modiste) who runs the boarding house, as she has arthritis and is struggling.

Alexia is afraid her father's lost his job and he's really pretty much an ass, so when she stands up for the modiste and doesn't let her father pull a get rich quick scam on her, it really makes you love her. She's offered an apprenticeship while her father is told to vacate quickly and he won't be arrested. Alexia chooses to make a life for herself and learn an honest trade, while you get the sense her father will never really learn.

She's another great personality like Ellen, but I like the story better in this one, so it's a better full package.

Evie's book is hard to read because the poor Irish racist neighbor brothers are just such assholes. Evie and her father are going to buy her mother today from the pair's former master. They'd been freed by the second master they had, who never bought the mother. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, but I like this girl and so would Addy Walker. They'd totally be friends.

AMERICAN DIARIES Part 1

Kathleen Duey's American Diaries series runs for 19 books. The series began in 1996 with four books, followed by another four in 1997, three each in 1998, 1999 and 2000, one in 2001, and the final book in 2002.

The books are much shorter than Dear America and they're quick reads. They're not true diary format either. Each begins and ends with a diary entry and there are maybe a couple more scattered in the middle.

There are two types of cover used for the series. The first type is as shown here with the cameo design containing an image of the girl that goes from her head down to about her waist or a bit lower. The second design retains the cameo, but the girls are now shown from about the shoulders up and that's it. I prefer the first design because they're more interesting-looking. The later books look far more plain.

They don't run in chronological order, as most of these series don't, but being numbered, I always read them in the order of their numbering, not chronologically.

The first book stars Sarah Anne Hartford, a girl growing up in Puritan Massachusetts in 1651. Sarah's is actually the first book chronologically as well and no others are set during the 1600s.

Each story does not span many days and deals with one major problem. Sarah and her friend were walking home from church and were caught playing in the snow, which was a pretty punishable offense in their society. Sarah, however, was wearing the coat of her friend's older brother and the people think it was him and not her. She debates with herself for awhile, torn between telling the truth and possibly losing the love of her strict father, who is courting a really nasty woman.

The second book, featuring Emma Eileen Grove, is set in 1865 after the end of the Civil War. Emma, her older brother and younger sister are travelling on a steamboat to St. Louis in search of their uncle. Their father is who knows where after the war and their mother died during it. They harbor a hatred for Yankees and a very poor understanding of what the war was actually about. (I sneer through Civil War stuff that has the characters say the war was about anything but slavery.) There's an accident with the ship and Emma and her younger sister are forced to rely on the help of a black worker and a Yankee soldier to survive. The older Southern woman who befriended them is also revealed to come from a plantation with a nasty reputation, so by the end of the book, Emma's a bit wiser about how people actually are. I still don't like her though!

Anisett is an idiot.

That's pretty much the whole book.

Set in 1851 California during the gold-mining craze, this book tells about Anisett and her mother, who make dinner pails for the miners. Anisett's younger brother is mentally disabled, though it isn't clear exactly how, unlike in certain Dear America books where the boys had Down Syndrome. Anisett finds a gold nugget and doesn't know how to go about staking a claim, so she asks the relatives of a nice new miner she just met. However, she's overheard by this guy who spends the entire book being an utter prick, and he hijacks everyone with plans to take over the claim. The day is saved, of course, by some quick thinking and some outside help, but Anisett is still an idiot. She spends most of the book getting yelled at for daydreaming. Repeatedly. Like screw up a couple times, but how are you supposed to like a character that doesn't seem to ever learn?

This sad copy of the book is the only clear picture I could find of Mary's book. She's in Philadelphia in 1777 and her family are mostly Loyalists, except her brother who was disowned for joining the Patriot army.

So what happens when her delirious, injured brother returns home the same day as the family throws a giant party for the British officers?

I enjoyed this one the most out of these four. Mary's a fun character and she's not annoying like Anisett or ignorant like Emma. Her art is so unattractive though! Poor girl!