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: Wrapping Up the 1800s

Zulu War is a really interesting addition to this series. Another of the better war books, like Indian Mutiny.

Jabulani's a great character and the entire book is loaded with other good characters.

It's one of those that I enjoyed, but don't have much to say about.

I feel like I could buy myself a nice meal if I had a dollar for every time I read the words "phossy jaw" between this book, Sweep's Boy and Victorian Workhouse.

This one's another during that same time period, only from the perspective of a poorer girl, not a poor boy or rich girl.

She works in a match factory, although not with the phosphorus, and gets caught up in the strike. The biggest difference between this and a lot of the other books is that she's a bit older and has romantic dalliances with her somewhat dreary boyfriend and a dashing reporter.

I enjoyed this book, because Flora's an awesome character and her grandmother is even more awesome. Her older sister's a stupid bitch though. I don't care for that uppity girl.

Flora is interested in creating "moving pictures," which she's fascinated by and she agrees with her grandmother's progressive viewpoints on suffrage and the treatment of "colonial peoples." A lot of the other characters are disturbingly racist, even though it's appropriate for them to be written that way for time.

It's a good book because it doesn't delve too much into suffrage, unlike the next one.

I think this is one of my most disliked historical books. It continues Flora's story, sort of. At the beginning, her grandmother has just died and it's come to light that she took in a ward. The young girl is the daughter of a woman that made a brief but memorable appearance in Flora's book.

While I like the character of Flora a lot, I couldn't bring myself to get much farther than a few diary entries in this. This represents the violent side of the suffrage movement and frankly, that just bores me. I don't care about vandalism or force-feeding or abuse on the picket lines. I remember it took me a long time to suffer through it on my first read and I wasn't going to do it again.

I included this one in my final 1800s write up, because the entire rest of the series is WWI and WWII. I need to get a couple more books for the WWII section, but I opted to just take another break from this line and switch to the American Girl History Mysteries for awhile. War books. *groan*

MY STORY: 1600s

Civil War isn't a typical war book, which is nice. The male character is said to be too young to fight, when not that many books ago, we had 12-year-old archers.

This is the English Civil War with Charles I vs. the Roundheads, which I don't know much about. I kind of don't care either. Heh. There are certain parts of history I'm meh about.

Thomas's story is quite interesting though and he does a lot of different things. So it's worth the read.

The plague book is also pretty interesting. The girl is from a semi-wealthy family, but ends up trapped in her house, nursing her aunt, who eventually dies from the plague. Alice doesn't catch it herself, but has to wait out 40 days in her house until she's deemed safe to leave. Then she discovers her father was also sick and is stuck in one of the "pesthouses." So she tries to go to her uncle's farm, but they're not letting anyone from the city in. Back home she goes and her father ends up with her soon. There's a place where the diary could easily have ended, but then there's this whole bit tacked on months later where she's suddenly got a boyfriend and then the great fire happens. All that just feels like a useless bit of extra info, not a real story.

Highway Girl is okay. Most of the story, despite the title, is NOT about being a robber. And the ending sucks. I'm glad the three main characters get a happy ending, or at least what they wanted for the time being, but the way it happens sucks.

MY STORY: Ancient Egypt

My Story is the UK's version of Dear America. The main differences, aside from the obvious, are that both the girl and boy books are in one series and that some of the books are in diary form and some are more typical chapters. There does seem to be a My Royal Story division, but that only comes with the later additions. Also, there is some overlap with Dear America and the Royal Diaries. My Story includes some of the books written for DA and Royal Diaries.

There are a lot of these books with multiple cover styles. This one to the left is one of the newer ones. I prefer the look of the older covers myself, but it won't be until the 6th book that I can point that out with an accompanying photo. The five oldest books going in historical order all have the newer white covers.

Pyramid of Secrets is about an Egyptian orphan boy who lived during the building of the pyramids of Giza. Khufu's is finished and he's deceased, but the boy and his uncle are working on Khafre's. The boy's father was killed in an accident while building the pyramids, so he bears a grudge against the entire process, which makes him an easy target to be used by some prisoners also in the working camps.

This book was well-written and seemingly well-researched. I don't remember any glaring errors. It gives a nice idea of what it was like during these building projects and like Maia's book from my previous review, you get a glimpse of Ancient Egyptian daily life for non-royals.

Princess of Egypt, despite the rather boring cover line, is the diary of Hatshepsut when she was about 14. This is not just any Egyptian girl. I haven't read this in years, but it annoys me just as much as I remember.

You see, the author uses a lot of British slang and modern phrasings that pull you into today and don't leave you steeped in ancient Egypt. "Mum" was used and I swear "chap" was in there. And she actually counted "Eeny meeny miny mo" and said "puh-lease." Hatshepsut also goes by the nickname Asha, which there is absolutely no record of and I think dumbs down her character even more than the language of the book already does. And Thutmose II is portrayed as a complete drunken idiot, which does him disservice.

This one really is not worth reading. The plot is your stereotypical evil vizier fare and it really does not teach anything about Egypt other books don't handle better. It's sad that Hatshepsut's one entry into all these historical fiction series I read is complete shit.