DEAR AMERICA & MY AMERICA: Immigrants

Say hello to one of my favorite Dear America books. This is definitely near the top.

Dreams in the Golden Country is about Zipporah (I always want to stick a T on the front of her name), a Russian Jewish immigrant starting her new life in New York City.

Every character is interesting. Her father is a musician, while her mother wants to stick to some of her old-fashioned Jewish ways. Her eldest sister becomes obsessed with labor unions and the middle sister runs off and marries an Irishman! There are great tragedies and quite a bit of drama, but they're well-written and they feel real, not sensationalized.

Zippy was one of the girls who got a live action special.

Unfortunately, I've never seen it!

She's just a great character. And I have to wonder if the American Girl Rebecca author was a Zippy fan. Both girls come from Russian Jewish families. Both live in New York City. Both want to be actresses. I think my love of Zipporah is why I loved Rebecca so much when he books came out. Not that they're that much alike, but the little similarities are enjoyable.

Zippy was one of the four dolls in the second set of Madame Alexander Dear America dolls. Sadly, these were never made. Zipporah would have been my most wanted, although I think Sarah Nita is the best of the four. Zippy's just that much of a favorite of mine!

I'm honestly shocked her book was not part of the rereleases. It's a pretty important one, I think.


Moving on, I was going to do just Zipporah's review, but then I started the My America Sofia trilogy. These three books were also written by Kathryn Lasky, so I decided to stick them on the end here.

Sofia's another immigrant child in a large-ish family. The thing that really made me put her review on Zippy's is that the same thing happens to both characters. At the end of their journey, the girls are both looking up at the Statue of Liberty when they get a cinder in their eyes. This causes them to not pass inspection and get an E chalked on their backs. Zippy's quick-thinking eldest sister saves her by flipping her coat inside out, but Sofia's family is not that on top of things and she's dragged off alone to quarantine.

The entire first book, Hope in My Heart, is about Sofia's adventures in quarantine, where she meets her new best friend, an Irish immigrant named Maureen, who also had the cinder-in-the-eye incident happen. The girls finally get out at the end.

The second book, Home at Last, is about Sofia getting settled in Boston, MA. I'm glad Lasky moved the setting to Boston, because New York would have been too much like Zippy. Sofia excels at school, watches her family adapt and succeed, and eventually develops infantile paralysis and then has to struggle with that at the end. The only unrealistic part is Maureen. Maureen's family stayed in New York, but the two keep in touch via carrier pigeon. Well, Maureen's mother dies and her father can't find work, so he decides to take himself and his fifteen kids back to Ireland. It's never explained well, but somehow he accepts Sofia's family's offer to take Maureen in. So she now lives with Sofia's family, while everyone else is across the ocean back in Ireland. It just seems to happen too easily, more for plot development than the sake of actually telling a realistic story.

An American Spring is the final book in the trilogy and follows Maureen and Sofia through their spring together. They help Sofia's big sister Gabriella with her new dress-making business. They work in the family store. They do a school scavenger hunt-type exercise with riddles about the American Revolution. So they're learning history and talking about history within a historical fiction book.

Sofia's a cute character, but I think her trilogy is possibly the weakest in My America. Zippy handled this topic and did it better. All three books have unrealistic elements. It's not Lasky's best work.

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.

MY AMERICA: Freedom from Slavery

Corey's trilogy includes Freedom's Wings, Flying Free and Message in the Sky.

Corey is a slave who was secretly taught to read and write by his father. His diaries are one of the few in the entire series where he freely lets other people read them. The first one contains lists of words he spelled wrong, so he can learn to spell them properly. It's a bit distracting, but it does make it feel more like something real.

Corey captures his journey to freedom and the aftermath very well. He's got an unintentionally poetic style of writing in some entries. He's also quite skilled with birds, which is an interesting talent for a nine-year-old.

This trilogy is Sharon Dennis Wyeth's only DA series contribution. I was familiar with her name, so I assumed she'd written more, but I know of her because she wrote Pen Pals, part of the 80s/90s girl book series boom.

Corey's books bring us two-fifths of the way through my Dear America reread. I am taking a break from them until after I get back from my vacation. I need to whittle down some of my other book piles before diving back into DA!

MY AMERICA: Prairie Life

Meg's trilogy of prairie diaries are As Far As I Can See, For This Land, and A Fine Start.

Meg is a well-off girl from St. Louis who gets sent to Kansas Territory with her younger brother because cholera is hitting St. Louis. Despite being rather pampered, she adjusts to prairie life quickly. She is joined eventually by her mother and younger sister, then finally her father. Her father and uncle fight the Border Ruffians, men who came to Kansas for the sole purpose to vote it as a slave state, and her father loses the use of his left arm. Thanks to this injury, Meg's family moves into a home in Lawrence, where she enjoys living in town close to the school.

Anything prairie will always remind me of Little House, although the author did a very good job of telling about life on the prairie without actually sounding much like Little House at all. The only bit that really made me smile was Meg's teacher bearing the name of Miss Wilder. Heh.

The Meg trilogy is McMullan's only contribution to any of the DA series, but she did a fun series called Myth-O-Mania that I will be reviewing as I reread it. I just learned two new volumes came out in 2013 and 2014! Had no idea!

MY AMERICA: Oregon Trail

Joshua's trilogy is Westward to Home, A Perfect Place and The Wild Year. Author Patricia Hermes wrote the Elizabeth trilogy also for My America. Joshua's series is good, but I preferred Elizabeth's.

We are finally done with Oregon Trail books. I am never doing this again. Ha. Joshua's series is good though, because only Westward to Home is about the trail. At the end, they get there. The second and third books are about their time in Oregon, which none of the others really did, so that was more interesting to read.

The trilogy is a good, quick read and though aimed at younger readers, it doesn't pull any punches. We've got a lot of tragedy in here, just like all the other trail books.

MY AMERICA & DEAR AMERICA: Revolutionary War

The Winter of Red Snow is one of the big name Dear America books. It was the second in the series, following Mem's book. It is also the only book in the series to receive a sequel, which was part of the second run of the series in 2011.

I commend Kristiana Gregory for tying a bunch of stuff together, because I'm not sure I realized it at the time, but characters from this book appear in her My America trilogy set during the same war.

Hope's trilogy (Five Smooth Stones, We Are Patriots and When Freedom Comes) are actually set earlier, so I began my reread with them. I had to wait a bit to start, because somehow, I hadn't realized there was a third book and I was missing it! Hope's books are pretty good, but not as strong as Elizabeth's, the first My America series I reread. It was fun to see Abigail and Lucy there for a brief moment though. I never caught that before, or if I did, I'd long since forgotten.

As for Abigail's book, it's all right. It's not one of my favorites. It's one of those ones where it seems a little too convenient for the family to be that close to all the action. Abby's mother is acting as laundress for the Washingtons while the winter in Valley Forge.

Abby, where's your cap?

The reissue cover I don't care for. My problem with a lot of these, despite being lovely art, is that the girls look a trifle too modern and far too old. That's not the face of an eleven-year-old. Abby also always wears her cap, so seeing her without it is weird. I think the picture chosen for the original book is a better Abby.

Then there's movie Abby.

And she also looks too old.

I don't remember the movie, but I probably watched it. Iceman from the X-Men films played the older sister's would-eventually-be husband. Ha.

Abby was one of the lucky foursome to become a doll. I had her for a brief time, before she left to live with a friend.

Abby and Caty

Now we can move on to the sequel. This was just weird. It's hard to read a sequel when the epilogue at the end of the first book told you what happened to some of the characters, though I was always annoyed it didn't tell you all of them, so at least the epilogue filled that out a smidge more. But only a smidge. I honestly have to say that I was bored. Abby's house burns down so she and her family become camp followers...for YEARS. So it's boring daily life and sad deaths and kids getting married at 15 and *shudder* It's hard to read about the girl who you think of as a little girl in her first book being not just married but hugely pregnant at the end of the second. At fifteen years old. It happened, especially during wartime, but the disjoint is still pretty massive.

Although now her cover art makes me feel better, because at least she looks fifteen!

I think you could easily skip the sequel. Abby's growing relationship is kinda cute, but it's no Snowbird captures Snow Hunter.

MY AMERICA: ELIZABETH

The My America series was written for younger readers. According to Amazon, it's for ages 7-9, as opposed to Dear America's 9-12. That makes them fun, quick reads. There are 7 characters in the series with 3 books apiece. Patricia Hermes wrote both Elizabeth's and Joshua's, but contributed nothing else to any DA-related series.

I debated on how to tackle these next few books, because they're all about the New World. Elizabeth's comes in a lot earlier at 1609. The next is Mem's well-known DA at 1620. I was considering doing all of them in one big entry, but opted to do separate reviews instead, in case I get side-tracked.

Elizabeth arrives in Jamestown, having gone through a hurricane and lost several of their ships, including the one bearing the majority of the food. She sees a lot of hard times. People are dying left and right, both from disease and from starvation. There are conflicts with the Indians, although Pocahontas is a positive presence. The little town is run by a string of selfish incompetents and people often get away with not doing their fair share of the work.

Elizabeth is a fun character, being "a little bit mean" as she describes herself. Her friend in the first book is a mostly good girl, but her friend in the second and third books is more like herself. They can be sassy and stick up for themselves in a way that almost feels too modern, but then considering what they're going through, they've earned the right to respect. The books blend realistic conflicts between mostly realistic characters into a historically trying time with ease. I wish Hermes would have tackled a full-length DA book or a Royal Diary. I think she would have done an excellent job.