AMERICAN DIARIES Part 5

If you like standing in line, this is the book for you! Possibly the least exciting book in the entire series. Nell's mom's kind of a judgy asshole, so that's not fun. Her grandmother's become forgetful and sees her dead husband everywhere, making Nell worry that she'll be sent back to Ireland and Nell will have to go with her. Her little sister is beyond old enough to stand, but gets toted around everywhere. There's a bit of interesting stuff at the beginning, but then they stand in line to get off the ship, they stand in line in the freezing cold waiting for the ferry, they stand on the ferry waiting to get off at Ellis Island, then they stand around Ellis Island for all the inspections. It's boring. It's also sad because they introduced a nice man only to have him fucking freeze to death. Nice going, Duey. Apparently, that was the only way she felt she could liven up her story of Standing in Fucking Lines Forever. 

Thankfully, Francesca's got a much better story. She's from a wealthy DC family. The mom does a lot of charity work. And this is the only book where the subject is suffrage that I've ever actually quite liked. The characters are interesting and the story moves along at a good pace. Not much standing around in this one! 

Janey's another white girl's point of view of Pearl Harbor, so ho hum there, but she's accompanied for most of the book by Akiko, who lives across the street from her and is a Japanese girl her age. As for Pearl Harbor stories though, this feels too short. I wanted more details, but that's the problem of trying to make these books last only the span of one day.

Zellie finishes off the series. She's a free black girl whose grandmother just died, leaving her on her own at age twelve. She walks to another town and finds work in a boardinghouse for mill girls, but the woman running it wants her to spy on them. There's some pretty good intrigue in this one and Zellie's a very likeable character. I could have read a longer book about her. 

So that finishes off American Diaries. I'm going to switch back to My Story, though I'm not sure just when yet. I might work on something else first.