DEAR AMERICA & MY AMERICA: Immigrants

Say hello to one of my favorite Dear America books. This is definitely near the top.

Dreams in the Golden Country is about Zipporah (I always want to stick a T on the front of her name), a Russian Jewish immigrant starting her new life in New York City.

Every character is interesting. Her father is a musician, while her mother wants to stick to some of her old-fashioned Jewish ways. Her eldest sister becomes obsessed with labor unions and the middle sister runs off and marries an Irishman! There are great tragedies and quite a bit of drama, but they're well-written and they feel real, not sensationalized.

Zippy was one of the girls who got a live action special.

Unfortunately, I've never seen it!

She's just a great character. And I have to wonder if the American Girl Rebecca author was a Zippy fan. Both girls come from Russian Jewish families. Both live in New York City. Both want to be actresses. I think my love of Zipporah is why I loved Rebecca so much when he books came out. Not that they're that much alike, but the little similarities are enjoyable.

Zippy was one of the four dolls in the second set of Madame Alexander Dear America dolls. Sadly, these were never made. Zipporah would have been my most wanted, although I think Sarah Nita is the best of the four. Zippy's just that much of a favorite of mine!

I'm honestly shocked her book was not part of the rereleases. It's a pretty important one, I think.


Moving on, I was going to do just Zipporah's review, but then I started the My America Sofia trilogy. These three books were also written by Kathryn Lasky, so I decided to stick them on the end here.

Sofia's another immigrant child in a large-ish family. The thing that really made me put her review on Zippy's is that the same thing happens to both characters. At the end of their journey, the girls are both looking up at the Statue of Liberty when they get a cinder in their eyes. This causes them to not pass inspection and get an E chalked on their backs. Zippy's quick-thinking eldest sister saves her by flipping her coat inside out, but Sofia's family is not that on top of things and she's dragged off alone to quarantine.

The entire first book, Hope in My Heart, is about Sofia's adventures in quarantine, where she meets her new best friend, an Irish immigrant named Maureen, who also had the cinder-in-the-eye incident happen. The girls finally get out at the end.

The second book, Home at Last, is about Sofia getting settled in Boston, MA. I'm glad Lasky moved the setting to Boston, because New York would have been too much like Zippy. Sofia excels at school, watches her family adapt and succeed, and eventually develops infantile paralysis and then has to struggle with that at the end. The only unrealistic part is Maureen. Maureen's family stayed in New York, but the two keep in touch via carrier pigeon. Well, Maureen's mother dies and her father can't find work, so he decides to take himself and his fifteen kids back to Ireland. It's never explained well, but somehow he accepts Sofia's family's offer to take Maureen in. So she now lives with Sofia's family, while everyone else is across the ocean back in Ireland. It just seems to happen too easily, more for plot development than the sake of actually telling a realistic story.

An American Spring is the final book in the trilogy and follows Maureen and Sofia through their spring together. They help Sofia's big sister Gabriella with her new dress-making business. They work in the family store. They do a school scavenger hunt-type exercise with riddles about the American Revolution. So they're learning history and talking about history within a historical fiction book.

Sofia's a cute character, but I think her trilogy is possibly the weakest in My America. Zippy handled this topic and did it better. All three books have unrealistic elements. It's not Lasky's best work.