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.