WWII: Part 2

Three more from the WWII section of the Dear America and spinoff series.

Maddie Beck and her mother live with a group of people in a boarding house on Long Island, while Mr. Beck is away in his role as a naval officer.

Maddie reminds me a bit of an amped up version of Molly McIntire. She's very concerned about her dad and follows the news more closely than Molly does. And she strives to do something for the war effort, like Molly, but surpasses Molly's abilities by forming a group called Kids Fight for Freedom, alongside her best friend and soon-to-be-boyfriend Johnny. Actually, Maddie's like a combination of Molly and Kit. I feel like Kit really knew how to get shit done and Maddie's got that.

After her father's hurt, Maddie withdraws a lot, but then gets caught up in one of the most unrealistic plots in Dear America history. Not quite as sensational as some of the reboot books, but it's definitely up there! You'll have to read it to see what I mean.

It's a good addition to the DA series and I think it's one of the better ones about WWII.

Piper's story concerns how she and her family react to the internment of the Japanese in Seattle. Her father is a pastor for the Japanese Baptist church, while her older brother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack. For way too long, Piper is caught up in boy/girl drama while only occasionally thinking about what she should be doing and feeling about how she's seen her friends in the Japanese community treated. She eventually strays away from her white friends and asshole boyfriend and becomes friends with Betty Sato, a girl that attends her dad's church. She becomes more involved in what's going on, once the Japanese are rounded up and taken to their first relocation spot. When his congregation is moved to Minidoka in Idaho, Piper's dad decides to go along and take her with him. She has a fit at first, but gradually becomes happier with the people around her than she ever was back in Seattle, despite the hard circumstances and outside racist assholes.

I think this is one of the better reboot Dear Americas, although I did wonder a bit at why they chose a white girl to tell this story. Just like I wondered why a white girl had the Pearl Harbor book. There is a My Name Is America about a boy at one of the internment camps, so maaaaaaaybe that's why they chose to go this route, but meh. On the other hand though, I love anything that educates about this deplorable incident in American history.

Turned Away is sort of like My Secret War, only set in Canada. There are a few differences though.

First, the family is Jewish.

Second, Devorah has older brothers in the war, not her father.

Third, she doesn't spend nearly enough time on war things and sees way too many fucking movies! I swear, this chick is at the movies every other damn day. And she reads Agatha Christie constantly. Like I get that you're setting the time period, but dude, it's a historical fiction novel, not a pop culture 1940s book. And stop eating so much fucking popcorn. I don't even know how many times she bitched about a too-much-popcorn stomachache.

Fourth, the book constantly flip flops between being super serious and the movies/murder mysteries frivolity. It's a bit annoying. She has family trapped in France, including a cousin that writes to her as much as she can, and their story is utterly heartwrenching, yet on the next page, it's back to the damn movies. There are a lot of question sessions with her dad where she asks these ridiculous, impossible to answer big questions, too.

It was decent, I suppose, but mostly it just annoyed me. Part of that is because it was appalling to learn how few Jewish refugees Canada took in. They deliberately kept people out, because some antisemitic fuck was in charge. Nicely done, Canada. Not that the US has a perfect track record, but Canada is effin' huge and they could have taken in tens of thousands of people and they didn't. I believe the number mentioned in the historical note in the back of the book was 5,000. They took in 5,000 people. The US took in 200,000. Let that sink in and then try to read this without getting massively pissed. So much awful shit happened during WWII that having to read all these in a row is getting more and more difficult!

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 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.