MY STORY: WWI

Oh, boy, it's war books. There's a reason I took a long break from my My Story reread. My last review for this series was December 31st of last year. I know I got distracted with the American Girl History Mysteries, too, amongst other things, but now I'm finally looking to get these done. I've ordered the last two I was missing and added a third I hadn't even known existed until I searched for cover images for one of these books.

There is an enormous disparity between the books for WWI and those for WWII. I have three books here for WWI. Three. How many are there for WWII, you ask?

THIRTEEN. The three I have coming are all WWII.

Now you guys know I don't care for war books. Guy usually gets it into his head that he and his buddy are gonna run off to the front and win the war. Buddy dies. Guy comes home sad. Sometimes there's a girl.

Trenches is just like that. Except Billy doesn't get to stay with his childhood buddy, because Billy knows how to run a telegraph. So he becomes one of the telegraph guys and occasionally sees his pal. Then one day he learns his friend was court martialed and shot because he wouldn't follow his officer's idiot orders. You see, a lot of the officers weren't trained military men that earned their rank. Nope. They were rich assholes who knew nothing and only got rank because of their money/social status. Trenches was a decent book, though it suffered from the usual formulaic boringness of these war books. It held my attention in some places, but not all.

Flying Ace I liked better, because Jack Fairfax is actually from such a wealthy family that his dad is a lord. He bucks tradition and becomes a pilot instead of a cavalryman, upsetting his father. But his older bro's already over at the front, so why not do something different? Jack's a likeable character. He's the funny, reckless daredevil sort of rich kid, not the uppity type.

Jack and his friend get more characterization than the boys in Trenches so you care about them more. And I enjoyed their rivalry with German flying ace Von Klempter. You can guess what goes on there. Von Klempter ends up killing Jack's friend and Jack gets revenge. Formulaic, yes, but I think better written than several of the others.

Oh, hooray, a girl! This one's pretty decent. Daphne "Daffy" Rowntree is another wealthy character. Her father is killed in the war. Then her brother goes over and disappears. Her mother, who earns a living with her paintings, goes a bit off and starts putting fairies in all her work, acting like they're real creatures. Daffy is frustrating at first, because she's so utterly spoiled and naive, but she slowly grows as a character when she becomes an ambulance driver for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

Once over in France, Daffy has a load of new experiences like cleaning an engine and doing dishes. She meets a guy and there's a bit of drama there. She gets shot protecting a dog that reminds her of her dog at home, not realizing it's a very important messenger dog. So she's sent home, her guy finds her, they fix their problem, and it seems like everyone's going to be okay. Her mom's improving, even though it's become clear they're never going to learn what happened to the brother.

Definitely not a bad one. I liked learning about all the FANY ladies had to do and what they went through.

So next up is WWII. I'm not sure when I'll tackle them, because I'll likely read a lot while this hurricane is going on and we're probably going to be without power. They'll also be out of order, because I've got the 3 that aren't here yet. But soon enough, this reread will be done!

KARITO KIDS: Piper

Ah, our final Karito Kid! Piper is the only one of the group that was not in the original set. She came later on. Her book isn't written by the same author as the first set, but by the same author as Gia's second book.

Thankfully, unlike Lulu and Pita's books, there are no terrible parents in this one! Piper's mom's only fault is that she might want her daughter to be more girly than sporty.

Piper is a junior lifesaver, which is apparently a big thing in her part of Australia. She's into rescuing people or trying to, surfing, and saving the world environmentally.

I run into any character like this and she's automatically compared to Dawn from Babysitters Club. Is she early series Dawn or later Dawn?

A good thing for Piper and for me is that she's really not all that obnoxious about her Earth-saving side. Her best friend seems to be like turbo Dawn though. I didn't care for her or her obsessive need to tell Piper what happened to her first and never let Piper share her story first.

This book is a nice blend of mystery and stuff about Australia. I loved that they traveled to the Great Barrier Reef for a couple days to show off even more of the country, even though that's not where Piper lives.

Piper is a likeable character, even though I have absolutely nothing in common with her whatsoever.

Although I do subtract points for her wearing stupid uggs all the time! I hate those hideous lumpy things.

Granted, they were more in style when this was written, so it made sense for her, but still. Hideous.

Like Lulu, my doll is not wearing her stock outfit, which is the outfit on the book cover. I don't care for sporty stuff much, so she kept her swimsuit, but took the other pieces from a different Karito fashion pack.

Piper's doll looks older than the other girls in the line, although not too much older than Gia and Lulu, which suits her because I think she's a bit more mature than most of them. Maybe all of them. She's impulsive, reckless and single-minded, but that seems to go with the territory in this series, and her book isn't super unrealistic like others were.

KARITO KIDS: Lulu

I just finished Lulu's book after taking a little break from these.

Lulu's is a lot like Pita's. You learn the most about Kenya from the section in the back, not from the story, and what you do learn in the story is mostly bad, because, again like with Pita's book, it's the giant divide between the wealthy and the poor and between different groups.

Lulu's book also has troublesome parents. Her mother runs a kids' TV show and sucks up to the rich station owner to the point of compromising her daughter's integrity. Her father doesn't stick up for Lulu, even though he knows she's right. Neither parent seriously corrects their younger son when he's being blatantly prejudiced. Apparently, Kenya's got a lot of different groups in it and each one has a certain stereotype. Yeah, maybe that's something you should address properly in a children's book by having the characters who act prejudiced be clearly in the wrong? But no.

Same thing as with Pita's book. Her mother never gets over herself. Lulu's asshole little brother never gets any sort of comeuppance for being a prejudiced douche. He had a bet with Lulu over the guilt or innocence of the man she spends the entire book defending and they didn't take even one sentence to have her gleefully tell him she won the bet or have him admit that he was wrong. Perfect opportunity for him to learn a lesson about stereotyping, but nope. The author just let it slide.

Lulu's book also had a Ling-like level of danger going on that made it feel less believable.

Not her stock outfit!

Lulu is still a very likeable character despite all the nonsense going on in her book. I liked the basic plotline. They just took the danger element a bit too far. And I really wish, like with Pita's, that they'd spent more time in positive cultural things and showing that people with prejudices are severely in the wrong. If they could take the time to spend several pages revealing that the jerky rich son of the jerky rich station owner was actually not that bad a kid, then they could have slipped another lesson in there, too.