DEAR AMERICA: Prairie Teacher

This one is a very fast read. Obviously, because I just did my last review not that long ago tonight.

It's a good story, but the buildup is far too long. Her father's just died a couple months ago and it takes her so many pages to realize he's telling her in her dreams to take his place as the town's teacher. Yeah, it's got a smidge of a supernatural element, too. No real ghosts though.

I found the resistance to Sarah Jane teaching to be a bit ridiculous, because she's got, like, a dozen pupils and no one else is lining up for the job.

The story's rather boring. First, it's her not knowing what to do to earn money, then it's teaching stories and issues between the other boarders at the house she's staying in.

Historical teaching stories are never that interesting to me, because of all the different age groups crammed into one building and the older kids aren't so much always learning as they are helping teach the younger ones.

It's not a horrible book in the series, but it's just kinda there.

DEAR AMERICA: Bodie, California

While I haven't tackled them all yet, I think this may have been my favorite of the new additions to the Dear America series that accompanied the reissues.

As fitting a town like Bodie, this book is one hell of a wild ride. It's a murder mystery, a romance, a ghost story, a tale of discrimination from multiple points of view, and it's also got a lot of typical Western elements.

A surprising number of the characters are real people, including Angeline's parents, although in real life, the couple had no children.

The ghost story part is interesting, because most DAs stick with historical stuff and stay away with things more fanciful. I can't remember if any of the others I've read so far have any ghostly elements, except for Elizabeth's Royal Diary and her experiences with the ghost of Katherine Howard.

I think this is a very well-written and engaging addition to the line. It's more fiction-focused than historical, but I'm okay with that in this case.

DEAR AMERICA: The Controversial One

This book used to be one of my favorite Dear America stories. Ann Rinaldi's written dozens of books, most of which I've read over the past few years and most of which I haven't cared for much. I haven't read any critical reviews of her other books, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were problems there, too, although not as many as are in this book.

I don't remember where I first saw this book criticized, but after I read a scathing review of it, I never opened the cover again, nor will I now. It sits with my others, only because if I ever sell these, I want a complete set. 

You can read the review, too, and see just how awful a job Ann Rinaldi did:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/13_04/review.shtml

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Whaling Ship

This one is quite interesting, because I know nothing of whaling, so while I'm not that into sailing stories, at least there are some aspects that do interest me.

The characters are all decent, if a bit frustrating with the constant fighting.

DEAR AMERICA: Minnesota

This Dear America is quite different from the typical ones. The author based the story on real people, who were even real ancestors of hers. The meat of the story is fictionalized, but the bones are truth.

I basically sum this up as English people come to America, thinking they're moving into a ready-made town in Minnesota, but instead there's nothing there except blizzards and mud and locusts. It's like they played a Little House on the Prairie reality show and failed miserably.

The main character is somewhat likeable, but I quickly became frustrated with her and her stepmother's complete inability to make the father see that pretty much everything he was doing was wrong. They let the servant girl get away with doing nothing and eventually even paid to send her crying ass back to England. Stupid. The stepmother grows into a decent character, but the father's complete failure to do anything you actually need to be able to do to survive as a settler is mindblowing, considering he'd been in Minnesota once before and should have known he couldn't do this. It's like he expected everyone to do his work for him, just because he was the preacher they all followed there. But that never happened, because everyone got pissed at him for not telling the truth about...well, most everything. The bratty little sister isn't punished for ruining the main's paints and last paper, which she's been using as therapy.

And then the author decided to invent a best friend character for the main, who lost her little brother on the sea voyage over and her mother to suicide shortly after they arrive, then had to endure beatings from her drunken father. She ends up running away with a local Ojibwe man and actually got the only decent happy ending in the whole book, because they love each other. But who looks at their family history and thinks "Hey, needs more child abuse" and sticks that into this story for kids?

Definitely one of the skippable Dear Americas. You're not learning anything about prairie living here that you couldn't get from Laura Ingalls Wilder.

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Black Cowboy

A good entry into the series, but not one of the most interesting. There's only so much you can tell about cowboys. I think it's one of those things that needs to be seen rather than read about to fully grasp it.

It's also tough to write about a town like Abilene, Kansas when you're writing for a kids' series. 

It is nice to see a black character treated almost the same as the white and Mexican cowboys right off the bat. Almost. But that shortly after the Civil War, it's a lot more than you'd expect.

Not gonna lie though, I did tear up when he had to put his horse out of its misery. Animal death always gets me, so consider yourself warned about that.

Walter Dean Myers was a celebrated and prolific author and contributed three books to the My Name Is America series, of which this one is the first. 

Vintage Horror Anthologies

 

I don't remember where I got this book, but in 1991 when it was published, I was 13 and into all the young adult horror out at the time. It was possibly a book fair or the bookstore. 

Vampires is an anthology of short stories geared towards an age group slightly younger than, say, Christopher Pike's readers. Tweens probably, even though we didn't have that word back then. But that doesn't make the stories any less effective. I have read a LOT of horror in my years and this book is always with my favorites where I can get to it easily for a quick reread. 

On the back cover, it mentioned they did a similar book called Werewolves, but even though I search the local libraries and bookstores, I never found it. I came to believe it didn't exist. I know I thought of it a few times over my internet-accessible years, but only recently did I decide to finally look it up. I found a used library copy for about eight bucks on ebay and it arrived today. 

I'll always prefer vampires to werewolves, but the stories are still excellent. Even though I just got some library books today (not that I need them, but I learned about a newer Lauren Myracle series and wanted to read them without spending money), I opened this and read it cover to cover without even thinking about the books from the library. 

If you like a good horror anthology, check these out. Yolen and Greenberg did other anthologies, too, and I'm going to try to find cheap copies of a couple of the ghost story ones. Vampires is pretty easy to find and cheap, but you'll pay a little more for Werewolves. It came out in 1988 and doesn't appear to have gotten as big a circulation as Vampires. 

Another favorite anthology from my youth is Raymond Van Over's Monsters You Never Heard Of. This one's for a little older readers, though still not quite to the teen level of the most popular YA horror books of the time. It's very well-written though and a lot of the stories have stuck with me over the decades. This was published in 1989 and it popped right up on Amazon. 

If you prefer a variety of creatures, definitely get the monster book, although I give my highest recommendation to all three of these.