MY STORY: WWII

It's been over two years, but I'm finally finishing my work on the My Story series. I've ordered two books that I thought I had, but I think they were lost in the mail after the hurricane and never arrived. (ETA: I wrote this back when I started this post a few months ago. All the books arrived.)

This one I did read back in 2018, but I've forgotten it. The war hadn't begun yet, but this is definitely the batch of reviews where this belongs. 

Most of the book takes place in England just following the daily life of 15-year-old Ellie. She's a swimmer and goes to a nice school. She's not quite posh level, but close. Her best friend is Jewish, so you see hints of things beginning and they hit close to home for Ellie thanks to Sarah being her best friend. 

The girls don't make it to the Olympics to compete, but they're included in some sort of demonstration event and go along. Once there, they really don't care for the accommodations or what they're seeing in Germany. Ellie is deliberately provocative with some Hitler Youth boys during a party they're forced to attend. Their guide Elke doesn't like this but ends up bringing the girls each a box of chocolates before their event. Sarah eats some, Ellie does not, and Sarah becomes too ill to compete. The question of whether or not Elke poisoned her is never answered, though Elke is not seen again. Sarah tells Ellie to go compete, though Ellie herself has mixed feelings about it. She ends her diary without telling what happened, though four years later, she picks it back up and writes an entry about what happened that day (she placed second and her family ended up rescuing Sarah's relatives and bringing them home to London) and what she'd been doing since. She and Sarah both gave up swimming and Ellie is now working with the RAF. 

I enjoyed this one because it was a different story than I've read before. A lot of the books I'm about to read are going to be your typical wartime fare, but not this one. My biggest issue is that somehow at least one page is missing! The book goes from page 111 to 112 correctly, but it's very obvious that something happened and that page or two is missing from the book. It's a very odd error and frustrating. My copy has water damage, so I may pick up another sometime and see if it's incomplete, too, or if I'll finally know what happened with Goebbels and Riefenstahl at the party. 

This one is different than my other war books. It follows a young Polish girl on her journey across Europe as she and her parents flee from the Nazis. First, they go to Paris then Nice then into the mountains. Each place they spend years or months, so much time passes through the entire book. There's a two-year gap after her mother's death in between her two diaries. She writes letters set in 1948 before, between and after her two diaries to explain the setting to the friend she's sending them to. 

I enjoyed this a lot, even though the subject matter is always difficult. It was well-written, aside from a few odd technical errors these books tend to have, and engaging. 

Wartime Princess is the diary of Margaret Rose, the younger sister of the woman who would become Queen Elizabeth II. This is an interesting read, because, like the previous book, it's not a topic I've read about before. However, it struggles from using Margaret as the point of view. The story is really about Elizabeth, but she's very distant. It would have been better from her own point of view, but with her still living, I'm not sure that would ever be feasible. It also suffers because they simply tried to cover too much time. Diary entries are frequently once a month and time passes very quickly, even though the book is longer than your typical My Story. So you've got a distant main character that's not the PoV plus time flying by making details seem too few. To add to that, it's hard to keep track of the year, because each entry is only marked with the month and day. When you've got a book covering so many years, you really need to keep track of them! I think this thing covers eight years. That's way longer than your typical kids' historical fiction, so having the year on each entry would have helped a lot. 

This one's title says it all. 19-year-old Kitty is a volunteer Red Cross nurse at a British hospital during the war. Unlike a lot of these war ones, there's no real romance tied in here. She's writing to a pilot, but realizes she has no feelings for him. There are hints of something between her and a younger doctor, but anything would be far in the future. The book is almost entirely medical experiences, which worsen as the months pass, especially after Dunkirk. 

Kitty is taking care of patients that can't be moved during an air raid and suffers burns on her hands while saving the life of one of them. She's sent home until she's healed, but she knows her life is as a nurse and vows to return.

This one is set in France with a French girl acting as a messenger for her small town's Resistance group. There's a lot of action, as the battles are taking place right there. It was interesting and pretty good.

Fighter pilot talks about being a fighter pilot. 

That's it. That's the book.

It's not bad. It's just not great either. Not much range in subject matter.

Gah, here's where I got sidetracked again. Some of these historical review posts end up being written over months or sometimes longer because I get so easily sidetracked from the reread. 

So I finished this one probably months ago and now have no recollection of it. Dangit. Just read a summary on Amazon and yeah, it was your basic Blitz story with the bombings, shelters, older brothers dying in battle, and being sent away for evacuation. The main difference is that Edie here realizes she and her younger brother are being abused by their so-called hosts, so she manages to get them back home. 

 

Kid goes into the navy to hopefully get revenge on the German U-Boat captain who killed some of his merchantman father's crew and endangered his father's life. This one is surprising well-written and engaging though. I really enjoyed it as these boys go into war stories go.

This one's about a French teen who ends up joining the Resistance and helps smuggle spies and Allies out of occupied France. Pretty decent. I like ones like these more than all the actual fighting. 

Mechanic teen joins the army as an engineer, which turns out to be someone who defuses bombs basically. And it's off to the North African front. I feel like this one was way heavier on the info than the characterization. 

I love when these are linked. The main character here is a descendant of Michael Pope, who was the main of the Crimean War book. 

This one starts out slow and its only real interest is that the main is an officer, so it's from a lesser-seen point of view. But once they hit the beach, the action picks up and it gets really good. There's even a very brief supernatural moment that isn't typically found in these types of historical fiction books, but it works. 

This one had a lot of the same elements of Spy Smuggler only it was from the point of view of the spy. The main is a French-born half-English half-French girl who loses both parents in the war. Her mother in the blitz, her father to torture as he was Resistance. When given the option to help, she takes it. The book was interesting, but I wish there was more of it. It could have been three times as long and gone into more detail about her training. As it was, the training felt rushed and then the mission felt rushed. I enjoyed it, but it could have been a lot longer and better for it. 

London Stories is an epic anthology that ties together the history of London across twelve different time periods. I really enjoyed this one. I wish they'd done more like it! 

And so that finally wraps up my My Story reread. It's taken me years to get this done. 

MY STORY: 1800s Part 1

Trafalgar's another ship life book, but it's actually quite a good one. Lots of action and decent characters.

The actual battle takes up very little of the book near the end.

Waterloo is by the same author and again, it's quite engaging. There's a murder mystery wound through it and quite a bit of intrigue. The main character isn't a soldier himself, but a servant to one of the officers, so he sees a lot of the action without the kid in battle aspect.

Both of these are better than my tiny blurbs are making them sound. If a book is good, sometimes I don't have much to say about it!

A teeny picture is what I could find for this particular cover. These are the older covers that I favor, even though I actually don't possess them for this book or the next. I have the newer, mostly white covers.

Mill Girl sums it up. Poor girl has to go to work in the mill. Her family kinda sucks. Sucky things happen to other poor people around her. But things work out okay in the end.

I love this cover. I should track this version down, but it's hard picking the cover when you have to import.

This one's quite the fairy tale. I mean, it's a depressing fairy tale, because Irish potato famine, but still. The girl goes to work in her wealthy landlord's house and she and the son fall for each other. He runs away to join the resistance, which is where her older brother is. With her mother dying, she goes to find her brother and fails, then when she returns, the house is burnt and the rest of the family is all gone. Then she goes to find them and ends up working for the resistance alongside the landlord's son. They run off to the US together and happen to find the rest of her family, minus her mother who predictably died as she was very sick before, and they all leave together. 

It's good, but more fairy tale-ish than historical.

Considering I've left the next book sit maybe 1/4 finished for several days, I'm taking a break from My Story and switching over to American Diaries for awhile.

MY STORY: 1700s

The '45 Rising takes place during the Jacobite rising of 1745. While I like the language of the book, the story reads like a bad romance novel. The diary author is all about clothes and parties and men and blah blah blah. Politics of course are a major topic, too.

Then it takes a turn when instead of one of her other proposals, Euphemia and her cousin decide they're in love.

No mention of their being first cousins. Guess this was okay in 1745 Scotland. 

So he goes to fight on the opposite side as the rest of the family and ends up changing his mind after he gets wounded. She sleeps with him unmarried at age 15 and gets knocked up, then he gets shot and she has to marry someone else to cover up the baby scandal.

Not exactly appropriate for a children's historical fiction series.

No Way Back is actually part of a series within the My Story series called My True Story. I will not be buying the others in the series, because I've just got so many of these books as it is and I don't need to buy more! I still need two more to complete this set. Plus, several are war and suffrage. Blech.

Anyway, this one is about Mary Wade, who was a young convict transported to Australia. She came in with the Second Fleet and ended up having so many kids that her descendants today number in the tens of thousands.

This story of transportation focuses on her life before the theft, her trial and time in jail, and her life aboard the ship. The book basically ends once she hits Australia.

It was pretty good and I knew her name sounded familiar, but it wasn't til I reached the end that I was like "Oh, yeah, she was real."

Elizabeth's book is set entirely in Australia with her telling her story to her newest master and his son and daughter. She doesn't dwell on prison or ship life, so combined, these two books paint a decent picture of early transportation. Elizabeth's is basically about starvation. It's a good read though. The only flaw is that My Story doesn't do epilogues and there are some characters that you really want an ending for. She was one of those.

Fall of the Blade is about a young French girl from an aristocratic family and the turmoil of the French Revolution. The beginning is decent, then she and her parents begin travelling from prison to prison, culminating in her being alone in Paris. She manages to escape rather too easily, conveniently meets up with the guy she rescued at the beginning, and they run off to England together.

No epilogue. No telling what happened to her brother or parents or dog. That's it. Just in England and safe. Nothing else. Yuk. I remember not liking this one the first time I read it and the poor ending is exactly why.

MY STORY: Tudor

I zipped through the Tudor/Elizabethan books over the past few days.

Lady Jane Grey is not one of my favorite subjects to begin with, but add to that a heaping helping of abusive parents and this book was painful to read. I felt like it went on too long but the entries kept jumping ahead in time and it also felt like it wasn't telling the whole story. Not the best book I've read about her.

Bloody Tower covers a similar time period. Tilly is the daughter of the Tower's doctor, so she's right there for a lot of the action, but as a commoner, she's a better character. The book covers the death of Edward, the turmoil with Lady Jane Grey, Mary's bloody rule, and finally ends with Elizabeth in power at last.

My only real complaint about it is that once again, we've got abusive parents. Not her father so much, but her mother "boxes her ears" on multiple occasions.

To Kill a Queen continues the story with Tilly's daughter as the diary author.

Tilly has married a nobleman who's in mysterious service to Queen Elizabeth. Kitty (Catherine) is the oldest daughter of the family, but she has older and younger siblings.

The family is right in the middle of the plot to kill Elizabeth, only Tilly's just slowly piecing everything together. One of her elder brothers made friends with Anthony Babington, who was one of the masterminds behind a plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

It's an exciting story and pretty fast-paced, although I was saddened to see that Tilly didn't learn a thing from her mother and has boxed her daughter's ears at some point.

What is it with abusive parents? Can't these authors write something decent?

Armada at least has a father that's only verbally abusive and that's reconciled a bit at the end.

It's a ship book. Nothing new here really. Asshole crew member that Thomas has a problem with. Ship terminology. Battles. The same old same old.

But seriously, three different authors and four different books, and every one has at least one abusive parent incident. Blech!

MY STORY: Romans and Britons and Vikings (oh, my)

This final trio of ancient world books does its job well. They read like a story, but also have a lot of historical detail included.

Claudia's book is set in Pompeii a short while before the inevitable eruption. She's what I'd call Roman middle class. She's not an aristocrat, but her family is wealthy. Her father is an ex-slave who made his fortune by baking. Her mother is from Egypt, which is pretty cool, but I wish Reid had done more with. The book gives an interesting look at the life of a middle class Roman teenager as well as what happens in the face of a natural disaster.

I have a different cover for Roman Invasion, but this is my preferred cover style, so I'll be posting these whenever I can.

Bran is taken captive along with his mother, younger sister and three cousins. The older male cousins are shipped off to Rome, likely to die in the arenas. Bran is sent with thousands of Roman soldiers to work on road construction. The threat hangs over his head that if he tries to escape or if his people attack, his mother and sister will be killed.

Bran is put in the charge of the Greek surveyor and his nephew, who's around Bran's age. The nephew was born unable to vocalize anything, so he's a different character than you'd expect to see. His disability is actually key to why the surveyor is there, which is explained in the book.

This book gives you a good idea of how the Roman army works and how the Roman empire has grown so much so successfully. It also has insights into the ways of the Briton peoples, although you learn more about the Romans than about them, which is a bit odd, considering Bran is Briton.

Viking Blood is another good one. A good story wrapped in information about the Viking society and especially loads of good Norse mythology. The text frequently stops to tell a myth, which is written in a different font.

I liked all of the characters in these three books. Definitely a step up from the Egyptian ones!

Next up is Agincourt and then we move into several books about the Tudors, which I'm excited to reread, and in one case, read for the first time.