The Life and Times Series

The Life and Times series consisted of only three books. Three short little books. Sadly.

I'm always a sucker for an ancient history theme, so I was excited to see books about young people in Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Maia's book is my favorite of the three, not necessarily because of the Egyptian setting, but because it's also the best written.

Maia's book is the only one that's a really complete tale. All elements of the story are fleshed out. You know all the characters well. You understand their motivations. Mostly. You never really understand why the uncle stole grain from the temple, but he's not given a chance to explain because of how events play out.

On Google, I found this alternate cover for the book. The first picture is how I have it. I think Maia's got one of the most beautiful book covers in my entire collection. It's just a gorgeous piece of art.

Ann Turner does an excellent job of blending teaching about life in ancient Egypt and creating a story with a cast of characters you enjoy. My only nitpick is that she doesn't give Seth a fail deal, but that's typical of Westerners writing about him. They have to insert that good vs. evil concept when it was actually order vs. chaos, which has a lot more gray area.

Barry Denenberg...SIGH...wrote the other two books in the series.

He really phoned in Pandora's. You get to learn a bit about ancient Greek life for women, but the story is rushed and the characters aren't very developed, even the lead girl, Pandora. Her whole point is that she's not satisfied with life for women in ancient Greece, then she gets caught up with Socrates but only very briefly, the consequences of what she does aren't even developed, and then she runs off with a guy she's met, like, four times.

It's too short, it doesn't teach enough, and it really feels like Denenberg just does not care. It's sad because there aren't many ancient Greece books in other historical series.

Atticus got a better deal. His book is loaded with facts about daily life in ancient Rome. It's so bogged down though that it's more textbook than tale. I never really got to care about Atticus, not until the end when he sees his father, and by that point, we're rip-roaring through the plot again and it's back to feeling like Denenberg doesn't care. It does have some nice history in there, but also a fantastic glaring error when the astrologer character asks Atticus when he's born and he says 82 BC. Well, the book cover says 30 BC and you are not 52. I think it was supposed to be 42. Not sure how 82 got in there.

I recommend Maia's book, but only Maia's. Skip the other two unless you're really hard-pressed for some ancient historical fic. The only reason I'm keeping them is because sometimes I really am that hard-pressed!

Since I'm in an ancient mood, I'm foregoing my previous plan to tackle two more American series, and I'm delving into My Story, the UK's version of Dear America, which starts with books on Egypt, Pompeii, Rome and the Vikings.

AMERICAN SISTERS 1905 & 1912

I finished my reread yesterday and I've actually decided to sell this set of nine books. I don't think I'll be missing anything if I never reread them.

Pacific Odyssey was good because it was a different story, but it still had the asshole parents element combined with some horrible racism going on between the different ethnicities in both Hawaii and California.

The story kind of fell apart at the end. Things happened far too quickly, I thought.

Still you don't often have Korean protagonists in one of these books, just Chinese and Japanese, so points for that.

And I did not finish this one. The younger sister Erna is an ungrateful brat and she's the only one of the two that survives. Another of the girls on the ship is portrayed badly, and the thing that bothered me is that the author used actual people for this. Not their actual experiences, just their names. She did this with previous books, but she had more written sources, diaries, books, etc. to work with so you got an idea of the people. Not here. She literally just picked some names. So after reading that in the back of the book, I closed it and did not finish.

Next up is the Life and Times miniseries. I don't want to call them a trilogy, because there are 3 but they're not connected, and I don't want to say series because again, there are only 3. These books take place in ancient times, so we've got Maia in 1463 BC Egypt (with the most gorgeous cover art ever), Pandora in 399 BC Athens, and Atticus in 30 BC Rome. The Greek and Roman books were written by Barry Denenberg, who we all know and sometimes like, sometimes don't. The Egyptian one was done by Ann Turner, who wrote a couple Dear Americas.

AMERICAN SISTERS 1852 & 1864

These next two American Sisters may as well my titled "My family members are useless twunts."

Duck, the girl from the Wagon Road book, lost her mom and her dad turned into a solid ass. Her older sisters are all nasty bitches. The boys are barely characters, except for the one that ends up dying. Duck eventually does some day-saving, but it's yet another trail book and I'd say skip it and read Dear America instead. I'm not here for this nasty sister shit.

Eda from the Colorado book also has bitchy sisters, but she's got delusional parents, too. Her father went broke back in Pennsylvania, so he brought the family to look for gold with him. Her mother still acts like she's in high society and spends the majority of the book being a completely useless moron. Her oldest sister has one leg shorter than the other and a screwed up foot and lords everything over everyone, expecting to be waited on constantly. Her other older sister is not so bad, but she's like the mother a bit and still trying to do things the society way. The father does stupid things. The mother does stupid things. The two sisters get a bit better by the end. Also, the book's title is misleading, because the majority of it is the four females sitting around in a cabin or a tent, not crossing the Rockies.

Man, I remember this series being better than this. Might end up selling these!

AMERICAN SISTERS 1775 and 1829

These next two books are quite similar, not in their subject matter or characters, but in that the action takes over the story and the character development falls by the wayside.

Wilderness Road takes place on the journey from Tennessee to "Caintuck." It follows two families, one more upper class and one very much not, the upper class family's slave and a couple single guys on their trip along a very dangerous road. They're constantly on the watch for Indians, although the ones they do meet are good people.

The eldest sister is the only one you get to know. The younger sister that plagues her constantly is only seen through her eyes and not really characterized. It's also completely unclear why the elder sister so wants the approval of the two older girls from the more upper class family when the entire trip they an their mother have been nothing but bitches. But she finally sees the light at the end.

It's a decent read, though I wish we could have gotten into Martha, the younger sister's, head. I mean, the series is called American SisterS, plural.

The Rio Grande book is quite different and I actually enjoyed it a lot. Rosita is 16 and her stepsisters are 17 and...I think 15? I can't remember how old Maria, the youngest one, is.

Rosita is about to be married to an old man and she's not happy about it. Nor is the 17-year-old because as the eldest, she thinks she should be first. Rosita's beauty is viewed as troublesome so the town basically told her father to marry her off, which is why she's the one being married first.

When a steamboat piloted by Americans comes by, Rosita runs away and hides on it, followed a short while later by Maria, who idolizes the older girl.

Maria is in disguise as a boy for most of the trip. Rosita pretends Maria (AKA Jose) is her servant, but the two are eventually found out as having no money, so they're turned into the ship's cooks.

There's a lot of drama with near mutiny, cholera, bandits and Indian attacks, but it's still good and the ending is decent.

AMERICAN SISTERS 1704

The next American Sisters book follows a pair of twins down the Boston Post Road in 1704.

The pair is indentured to a businesswoman. She receives a letter telling her to bring the girls to New York. She initially only takes one twin, but the other follows thanks to what isn't 100% clear but I consider a plot by the woman's mother.

Pretty much every character in the book is odd. The twins have typical twin oddities, the businesswoman is an opportunistic poetess, her daughter seems to only care about clothes but is better at the end, and the woman's mother speaks like a sailor.

This one is definitely full of Characters. It's another quick read, but not unenjoyable.

AMERICAN SISTERS 1630

American Sisters is a 9-book historical fiction series all by the same author, Laurie Lawlor. The series follows different sets of sisters on different journeys during different times in American history.

As with Dear America and all the other historical series I'm reviewing, I'm going in chronological order not order of publication.

The earliest book is set in 1630, when sisters Abigail and Hannah travel with their father and pregnant stepmother from England to America. They're Saints, so they have strict rules on how to behave.

Hannah is the most often used PoV character. Abigail is seen either through her sister's eyes or in short diary entries.

Hannah is the younger sister and the least like a typical "Saint." She's interested in people different than herself, but doesn't think badly of them, unlike her sister. She befriends a boy on the ship that isn't of their religion, which her sister both dislike for that reason and I think she's a bit jealous, too.

Abigail, the elder sister, is a pious twat. She fills her diary with rambling about religion, but also is obsessed with pretty clothes. She's judgmental of others in a bad way, where Hannah is open-minded.

Abigail's character never got turned around. She landed in the New World still overly pious and not very nice to her younger sister. I don't think she ever apologized for being a rat on the ship and getting Hannah's friend in trouble.

Abigail also bears a secret, one which makes this book quite bizarre. You see, the sisters' young stepmother is pregnant, but it's not by the girls' father, but their older brother! Caleb stayed behind in England and it's never made clear if they were found out by the father and that's why he went off to America, to separate them, or what. I don't think he knew, but I'm not sure. The relationship is very confusing, because the stepmother is an ass throughout the book and Caleb was nice during his short appearance, so I have no idea how they even hooked up. They're about the same age at least. One of the girls noted that early on. Abigail figures out the baby's real father, but ends up burning her diary at the end of the book, making sure no one else can learn the secret through her writing. The baby is stillborn, so that's how that ends up. It was a very bizarre addition to what is otherwise a typical kids' historical fiction book. And it's never really dealt with, which is frustrating. You've got a very adult storyline there and it's just not handled well.

The book was an easy read and I enjoyed the characters of Hannah and her friend Zach, but not the others. It's been a long time since I've read this, so it's going to be fun rereading them. I don't remember much about them at all!

Finishing Up the Reread

The final books! I honestly put some away already and can't remember for sure if this is all of them, but dammit, it's close enough.

After the onslaught of WWII books, it was nice to read something else. Biddy Owens' journal is mostly about baseball, but there's quite a bit of other stuff in there, too, which you can imagine. It's good. I enjoyed it, even for a sports-themed book!

Rose's diary takes place in 1948, after the war, but she's been tasked to write by the father in the third home she's been in since she came to Canada. He wants her to remember what happened to her and write it down, as a means of helping her regain some semblance of normalcy. It's hard to read Rose's diary both because of the Holocaust flashback sections and because the sister in this third home is a bitch. She's a nasty fucking brat who bullies people with her friends. They don't pick on Rose outright, but she never is welcoming to her, which is ridiculous. That's not how you treat people who went through what anyone who survived the Holocaust did. The worst thing is that she gets what she wants: Rose out of the house and never gets a comeuppance like she and her gang of bitches deserves. Rose is happy to go though, because she's actually wanted by her best friend's lively family. It's a good book, but frustrating for sure.

The next book in chronological order is These Are My Words. I reviewed this when it was new and I'd finished reading it, so look for it here:
http://redblackandwhitebookreviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/dear-canada-residential-school.html

1968 is the final year covered by any of these series. In an unusual turn, the same author wrote two books: one for Dear America and one for My Name Is America. The DA chronicles the younger sister of the teenager in the MNIA. I always read the DA books first, so I began with Molly.

She's quite a smart girl, although maybe not so much with boys. Much of her diary revolves around news from her brother Patrick, who's in Vietnam, and her trying to figure out how she feels about the war and what she wants to do about it.

Patrick's book is almost solely about what happens in Vietnam, not much about things back home. The fault of a pair of books like this is that no matter which you read, you find out what happens to the characters and that makes the endings a little less interesting.

Patrick's book was mostly just sad though. Almost everyone dies.

And the final one, which I just finished up last night, is the last Dear Canada anthology. Unlike the three Christmas ones, this is completely new stories with completely new characters and even some of the authors never wrote for the series.

There are some really good entries here and things aren't what you expect. Very few of the stories take place before the 1900s. There were a couple rough ones though. One was unsatisfying because the poor girl was abused by her parents and it being a short story, there's no resolution. Another was so off the wall, I wouldn't even consider it historical and I don't think it had any place in this book. But it was a decent end to this reread that's taken me ages, and now all my Dear America books and spinoffs are nicely packed away in my storage closet, and I have a large stack of other historical fiction to make my way through!

First, we're tackling the American Sisters series, then the three books in Journey to America, and then the American Diaries series. After that, I will probably move on to the UK's version of Dear America, which is called My Story. I'm going to go check those right now, because I think I'm missing some of the newer ones.

WWII Part 4

The LAST section of World War 2 books. You have no idea how sick of these I am.

I skimmed most of these. I've read all but one before.

This first one isn't bad, but the horrible epilogue kinda ruins the entire book.

Not that it's written poorly, like a Barry Denenberg lazy epilogue, but it's horrible what happens. I don't really feel it was a necessary addition to the story.

Sniper Fire I read through, because I'd never read it before. It's not bad if you don't mind a book of almost non-stop battles and if you can get past the cover guy looking like some relative of James Franco.

Not the worst of the I Am Canada war books by far, mostly because it's different. It drops you right into the battles and you stay there. There's no "I grew up idolizing this dude and went to war with him and one of us met a chick and this other buddy died and blah blah blah." It's not the formulaic I Am Canada.

Off to My Name Is America. This one reads as very disjointed, which actually makes it more believable as an actual soldier's diary.

It's very short and it goes by really quickly. Like doesn't go in depth very much. I feel like you learn more about the cast of characters in the epilogue than you do in the main journal.

And this last IAC, I fully admit I cracked open the cover, groaned and set it on the finished pile. I'm too sick of WWII to do it. I don't remember hating this one though. It's got the Resistance and the guys end up in Buchenwald, so there's a lot of depth here.

But I'm so happy to be done with WWII that I don't even care that the next book is about baseball!

WWII Part 3

Torn Apart is a bit different than the Dear America internment camp book, but it's actually less graphic. The majority of the book doesn't even take place in the camp. It's odd, but I feel like the DA book with the white main character captured the problems Japanese Americans and Canadians faced better than the DC book with the Japanese Canadian main character. This was good, but it felt tamed down somewhat. It should be hard to read these stories, because this was one of the most embarrassing and terrible times in American/Canadian history, but that wasn't there so much with Mary's book. I do like Mary and the other characters, but I think the Dear America and My Name Is America books tackled the subject better.

Defend or Die is the last in the 1941-starting books. The main character is a Canadian soldier in one of the Japanese-run PoW camps in Hong Kong. The story flashes back and forth between the present day and him recalling what happened as he writes it into a blank book he found. This is definitely one of the best I Am Canada books. It's a not often discussed subject and it's written incredibly well. I'm not big into the war-focused boy books, but this one is well worth the read.

Unlike the other internment diaries, Ben's takes place mostly in the camp. He's got a very different attitude than Piper and Mary, choosing to focus on playing baseball (it got boring in parts because it was too much baseball) and ignoring school. Ben doesn't exactly get a fair deal though, because like a lot of the MNIA series, the book is short and Ben rushes through a lot of things and doesn't do in depth about much.

This is also another of Denenberg's epilogue failures. The character of Mike does a couple dumb things and then isn't mentioned again until the epilogue when he's shot and killed doing an attempted robbery. Nothing about Ben's father's damaged state of mind is ever explained. Only tiny details about a few characters are given, although it's still better than Early Sunday Morning's epilogue.

Ben's book is the first that begins in 1942, but I wanted to place it here with these two, because the topic shift is going entirely to battle. No more internment, just battle after battle for the next four books. Then I think we're finally done with the war!

WWII: Part 2

Three more from the WWII section of the Dear America and spinoff series.

Maddie Beck and her mother live with a group of people in a boarding house on Long Island, while Mr. Beck is away in his role as a naval officer.

Maddie reminds me a bit of an amped up version of Molly McIntire. She's very concerned about her dad and follows the news more closely than Molly does. And she strives to do something for the war effort, like Molly, but surpasses Molly's abilities by forming a group called Kids Fight for Freedom, alongside her best friend and soon-to-be-boyfriend Johnny. Actually, Maddie's like a combination of Molly and Kit. I feel like Kit really knew how to get shit done and Maddie's got that.

After her father's hurt, Maddie withdraws a lot, but then gets caught up in one of the most unrealistic plots in Dear America history. Not quite as sensational as some of the reboot books, but it's definitely up there! You'll have to read it to see what I mean.

It's a good addition to the DA series and I think it's one of the better ones about WWII.

Piper's story concerns how she and her family react to the internment of the Japanese in Seattle. Her father is a pastor for the Japanese Baptist church, while her older brother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack. For way too long, Piper is caught up in boy/girl drama while only occasionally thinking about what she should be doing and feeling about how she's seen her friends in the Japanese community treated. She eventually strays away from her white friends and asshole boyfriend and becomes friends with Betty Sato, a girl that attends her dad's church. She becomes more involved in what's going on, once the Japanese are rounded up and taken to their first relocation spot. When his congregation is moved to Minidoka in Idaho, Piper's dad decides to go along and take her with him. She has a fit at first, but gradually becomes happier with the people around her than she ever was back in Seattle, despite the hard circumstances and outside racist assholes.

I think this is one of the better reboot Dear Americas, although I did wonder a bit at why they chose a white girl to tell this story. Just like I wondered why a white girl had the Pearl Harbor book. There is a My Name Is America about a boy at one of the internment camps, so maaaaaaaybe that's why they chose to go this route, but meh. On the other hand though, I love anything that educates about this deplorable incident in American history.

Turned Away is sort of like My Secret War, only set in Canada. There are a few differences though.

First, the family is Jewish.

Second, Devorah has older brothers in the war, not her father.

Third, she doesn't spend nearly enough time on war things and sees way too many fucking movies! I swear, this chick is at the movies every other damn day. And she reads Agatha Christie constantly. Like I get that you're setting the time period, but dude, it's a historical fiction novel, not a pop culture 1940s book. And stop eating so much fucking popcorn. I don't even know how many times she bitched about a too-much-popcorn stomachache.

Fourth, the book constantly flip flops between being super serious and the movies/murder mysteries frivolity. It's a bit annoying. She has family trapped in France, including a cousin that writes to her as much as she can, and their story is utterly heartwrenching, yet on the next page, it's back to the damn movies. There are a lot of question sessions with her dad where she asks these ridiculous, impossible to answer big questions, too.

It was decent, I suppose, but mostly it just annoyed me. Part of that is because it was appalling to learn how few Jewish refugees Canada took in. They deliberately kept people out, because some antisemitic fuck was in charge. Nicely done, Canada. Not that the US has a perfect track record, but Canada is effin' huge and they could have taken in tens of thousands of people and they didn't. I believe the number mentioned in the historical note in the back of the book was 5,000. They took in 5,000 people. The US took in 200,000. Let that sink in and then try to read this without getting massively pissed. So much awful shit happened during WWII that having to read all these in a row is getting more and more difficult!