Finally back with another review! I wish I was more consistent with these, but alas.
The Girls Survive series just released another four books. These actually came out a couple weeks before they were originally supposed to, so that was a pleasant surprise.
I'm going in chronological order again, so we're starting with the book set during the Civil War. This was written by the same author that did Ann and Noelle's books from the first batch of four.
Our main character is a 12-year-old free black girl named Charlotte who works for Elizabeth Van Lew, who was a real person. Miss Van Lew freed all her father's slaves upon his death and even tracked down their families and freed them, too. Fictional Charlotte is one of those she found and freed. Charlotte came to live with Miss Van Lew and work for her, along with Charlotte's older cousin Mary, who is also based on a real person.
The story is set in Richmond in 1864 and quickly jumps into the action with Charlotte learning Miss Van Lew and a lot of her friends are spies. Or "patriots," as Miss Van Lew insists. The story, like all of these books, is very fast-paced because the books are so short, so Charlotte starts off her own spy career the very next day after she discovers that little secret. Her adventures culminate in her risking everything to see her cousin Mary for a few moments, which thankfully turns out advantageous when it could easily have gotten everyone involved killed. The book ends on an open, but hopeful note.
I like this one the best of this author's three. I liked all the characters and it was cool to learn that so many of them were based on real historical figures.
I've gotta be honest, I didn't know how well I was going to do with Carrie's book. For those that didn't know, I'm a Hurricane Michael survivor. Not that things were that devastating, because I don't believe anything compares with the Galveston hurricane's level of loss of life, but still. It's still fresh.
It's 1900. Twelve-year-old Carrie's a bit of a flighty character. She seems on the shallow side, being really into clothing and hairstyles and she's obsessed with her best friend's older sister to the point of almost insulting said best friend. She was supposed to go to her best friend's house for a sleepover on the day of the hurricane, but Carrie's shallowness is eclipsed only by her mother's social-climbing, so Carrie's stuck at home babysitting her younger brother.
And then it's all boom, hurricane action. The water's rising. Let's go upstairs! The roof is caving in. Let's throw a chunk of it out the window and use it as a raft! Carrie does some pretty epic heroics. I'm not sure I really buy her being able to lift a chunk of roof big enough to float her and her brother on out a broken window. It's not like the water level was that high and she just directed it out the window while it was floating, which seems more believable. Then she does a daring rescue and she, her brother and the boy she saved wait out the hurricane on their roof raft, because Carrie managed to wedge it up against a couple trees.
When the storm is over, they make their way through the devastation and Carrie finds her mother, who says her father is also okay. He's helping with the rescue efforts. Carrie also runs into her teacher, who breaks the news that both Carrie's best friend and her beloved older sister are dead. Their entire family is dead. And Carrie freaks out because not only has she just learned she lost people, but she also knows she was almost dead, too, if she'd gone to the sleepover as planned.
The book ends on a hopeful note, as Carrie refuses to leave Galveston and says they should stay and rebuild because this is their home. William, the boy she rescued, lost most of his family, except his father and their dog, but he's staying as well.
Now to paraphrase Ann M. Martin for a second, what I didn't tell you was that Carrie was white and William was black. Remember the first four books that had prejudice shoved into each one? Some historical stories are meant for that. The Civil War. Pearl Harbor. Internment camps. Anything involving how Native Americans were treated. The Titanic one wasn't. This one isn't really either. The author explains that she liked the real life accounts she read of people helping each other regardless of their race during the Galveston hurricane, because Galveston was segregated. That's all well and good, but work it into the story naturally. There are a couple very heavy-handed mentions of Galveston being segregated and Carrie just treats it as the way it is rather than having any sort of emotion about it. It feels mechanical. Forced. Shallow. I like the character of William, but that whole angle could have been handled much better.
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Next up: Triangle Shirtwaist fire. From a slightly triggering hurricane story to one of my worst fears: being stuck in something on fire that I can't get out of. Yay.
So Lucia, or Lucy as she prefers, is a 14-year-old Italian immigrant. She wants to go to college and be an astronomer, but her father says no. He was injured at his job, so their only income right now is from Lucy and her brother's jobs, plus laundry their mother takes in, and boarders that share the only bed in the house.
Lucy works at Triangle, along with her friend Rosie, who's a Russian Jew. Rosie and Lucy's brother Tony have mutual crushes but can't hope to be together due to their religious backgrounds. That's the snippet of prejudice tossed into this book. Also working at Triangle are Lucy's cousin Cara, Cara's fiance Frank, an Italian boy named Michael that has a crush on Lucy, and a girl from Michael's hometown named Marcella that likes Michael and naturally then hates Lucy.
All these characters are established over the course of the first four chapters, as well as unions and poor conditions at the factories.
Then we get right into the fire and it's all action until the end. It's all panic. Michael finds Lucy, but ends up having to save Marcella. Lucy tries to find Rosie multiple times and does catch a glimpse of her once, but can't get to her. Lucy finally ends up on the building's roof and is one of the few that were on the ninth floor that managed to escape. Lucy actually worked on the eighth floor, but went to nine to look for Rosie.
Lucy finds Marcella in the aftermath. Marcella tells her Michael didn't make it and neither did Rosie, who was on the fire escape that collapsed. Cara's fiance Frank didn't make it either.
This one was mostly well-written and I thought it captured a lot of the tension well, after establishing the characters and their world.
Only one moment I thought was a poor choice. Lucy's cousin Cara is sick and can't go to work, so she gives Lucy a note for Frank. Lucy's caught up in some drama with Michael over lunch and forgets to take the note to Frank. At the end, Cara is comforted by the fact that Lucy gave Frank her note and he knew how she felt at the end. Eeyeah, except he didn't get it, because Lucy was being a forgetful idiot. Not that Lucy tells her. She lies her ass off. This whole situation was unnecessary and puts Lucy in a bad light for absolutely no reason.
Other than that though, this one was good.
And now the Holocaust book. Technically, Kristallnacht. I always struggle through Holocaust books. They're painful to read. I've been to Dachau. It's something you never forget. But in the light of some things going on in this country today, things like this are even harder to read.
I'm going to be brief because this was indeed a struggle to read. It was good, but difficult. You know the ending, while seemingly hopeful, is ultimately going to be sad, though you'll never know for sure.
I love that these books are always in groups of four. The next set, due out in February, will be about a Cherokee girl on the Trail of Tears, a black girl on the Oregon Trail, one living through the 1918 flu epidemic, and a Chinese-American girl during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
