SMITHSONIAN HISTORICAL FICTION Part 2

I'm glad to see this series continuing. I enjoyed the different topics the first four books covered. 

Ollie's book is set in 1871 and is about the great Chicago fire. Ollie works for the same wealthy family his parents worked for before they died. They kept Ollie on as a worker, but his younger sister had to go to an orphanage. Once the fire gets bad, Ollie goes to the orphanage to rescue her and is followed by Leo, the family's young son that he helps care for. The three kids fight their way through the dangerous streets and Ollie finds a nice woman and her son that let them stay in their rowboat out in Lake Michigan. Upon returning to Leo's house, they find it burnt down, but the family is so grateful to Ollie that they help him get a job as a teacher for younger kids, which also includes a place to live for himself and his sister, as well as the ability to continue his own education. Maybe a little too farfetched a happy ending, but I'll take it. 

Absolutely adored this one! David is a young Chinese-American boy travelling with his parents in 1889. They're fleeing San Francisco and trying to find David's uncle, hoping to work with him. Along the way, they meet a man helping organize a paleontological dig and he hires the entire family to help out. 

This one suffers because it's so short. I love the idea of Chinese immigrants helping with paleontology. It's a subject that's never been done before as far as I know, and I would have loved a longer book that told more about the early methods of digging, and the practices of museums. So my only complaint is that it should have been about five times as long!

 

Marika is a 13-year-old girl in 1970 who dreams of going to Harvard and studying economics. She can't understand why her white father and Indian mother, who struggled with prejudice because of their interracial marriage, don't understand prejudices against women. She gets wrapped up in helping her friend and that friend's family with a women's march for equality. 

This one again had nothing wrong except that it could easily have been much longer. I miss Dear America and wish they'd done topics like these two books.

This was a good one, again disappointing because I wish it was longer. 

Syretia, by the way, is pronounced like Saoirse. Ser-sha. This is Irish in the book, but I've never seen it spelled that way before and I'm wondering how true it is. Syretia is Irish and part Chinese. It's not clearly said, but I think her dad is half-Chinese. 

This takes place in 2012 at the same time as the landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover. The STEM camp is interesting, but again, I wish there was more. These books are simply too short! 

GIRLS SURVIVE Series

It's been many months since my last review! I've been reading, of course, but nothing really reviewable. Until now!

The Girls Survive series debuted on February 1st with four books. They're short books, each with only 112 pages and black and white illustrations.

Being a lover of children's historical fiction, I had to check these out, although I only recently got them.

Overall, I enjoyed them, but definitely some more than others.

Ann Fights for Freedom is the obvious Underground Railroad book. It's not as well done as Addy's first book from the American Girl line and nowhere near as good a look at slavery as Clotee's from the Dear America line, but it has decent characters and a fast-paced storyline that gives a good, if quite brief, look at the situation. I find the Underground Railroad bit a tad misleading though, because a main part of the plot is that they're NOT officially on the Underground Railroad.

Emmi's book was quite good and my second favorite of the line. Emmi is a German immigrant in Chicago who came over from Europe with her toymaker father. The story quickly moves into the events of the fire and it's very fast-paced.

Emmi's book did make me wonder something: whether or not the authors were instructed to include some sort of prejudice in each volume. Obviously, the slavery book and Pearl Harbor book featuring a Japanese character are going to have this, but the Chicago fire and the Titanic? Not necessarily and yet, there it was. Emmi has to run around the city with a pair of Irish twins that have bullied her for being German. The disaster quickly brings them together and they end up having a happy ending. I didn't mind including this aspect of Chicago life in the story, but it also made me want to read more. It seemed unrealistic to have the twins and Emmi come together so easily and forget all their past animosity. I suppose in times of great duress it does happen, but with a story this short, it felt rushed.

The language at the beginning of the book is a bit odd. The writer in me wanted to edit quite a few things, but I quickly became caught up in the story and looked past it.

Written by the same author as Ann's book, Noelle's lead character is half-Haitian, half-French. So here we go again with the prejudice side story. This time though, the story suffered for it. The instances of racism just felt tacked onto the already dramatic story of the Titanic disaster and the main character's point of view as a biracial girl in the early 1900s wasn't fleshed out like it should have been. This was a topic meant for a much longer book where it could have been explored in greater detail and given proper attention.

And of course, it's the Titanic. It's the only one without a happy ending. My least-liked of the four.

From least-liked on to favorite! Alice is the daughter of an American-born man of Japanese heritage and a Japanese immigrant woman. This is one of the only historical kids' fiction books I've read about Pearl Harbor that actually has the main character as Japanese.

I loved all the characters in this and the story really came alive. Despite it taking place over the most spread out amount of time, it felt like the most complete story. Although I still want to know what happened to everyone during the rest of their lives! This one didn't feel long enough, not because the writing wasn't done well, but because I got so attached to the characters, I wanted to read a full-length novel about them.

This series continues in August with two more books. One is a black girl spying during the Civil War and the other is the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.