MY STORY: WWII

It's been over two years, but I'm finally finishing my work on the My Story series. I've ordered two books that I thought I had, but I think they were lost in the mail after the hurricane and never arrived. (ETA: I wrote this back when I started this post a few months ago. All the books arrived.)

This one I did read back in 2018, but I've forgotten it. The war hadn't begun yet, but this is definitely the batch of reviews where this belongs. 

Most of the book takes place in England just following the daily life of 15-year-old Ellie. She's a swimmer and goes to a nice school. She's not quite posh level, but close. Her best friend is Jewish, so you see hints of things beginning and they hit close to home for Ellie thanks to Sarah being her best friend. 

The girls don't make it to the Olympics to compete, but they're included in some sort of demonstration event and go along. Once there, they really don't care for the accommodations or what they're seeing in Germany. Ellie is deliberately provocative with some Hitler Youth boys during a party they're forced to attend. Their guide Elke doesn't like this but ends up bringing the girls each a box of chocolates before their event. Sarah eats some, Ellie does not, and Sarah becomes too ill to compete. The question of whether or not Elke poisoned her is never answered, though Elke is not seen again. Sarah tells Ellie to go compete, though Ellie herself has mixed feelings about it. She ends her diary without telling what happened, though four years later, she picks it back up and writes an entry about what happened that day (she placed second and her family ended up rescuing Sarah's relatives and bringing them home to London) and what she'd been doing since. She and Sarah both gave up swimming and Ellie is now working with the RAF. 

I enjoyed this one because it was a different story than I've read before. A lot of the books I'm about to read are going to be your typical wartime fare, but not this one. My biggest issue is that somehow at least one page is missing! The book goes from page 111 to 112 correctly, but it's very obvious that something happened and that page or two is missing from the book. It's a very odd error and frustrating. My copy has water damage, so I may pick up another sometime and see if it's incomplete, too, or if I'll finally know what happened with Goebbels and Riefenstahl at the party. 

This one is different than my other war books. It follows a young Polish girl on her journey across Europe as she and her parents flee from the Nazis. First, they go to Paris then Nice then into the mountains. Each place they spend years or months, so much time passes through the entire book. There's a two-year gap after her mother's death in between her two diaries. She writes letters set in 1948 before, between and after her two diaries to explain the setting to the friend she's sending them to. 

I enjoyed this a lot, even though the subject matter is always difficult. It was well-written, aside from a few odd technical errors these books tend to have, and engaging. 

Wartime Princess is the diary of Margaret Rose, the younger sister of the woman who would become Queen Elizabeth II. This is an interesting read, because, like the previous book, it's not a topic I've read about before. However, it struggles from using Margaret as the point of view. The story is really about Elizabeth, but she's very distant. It would have been better from her own point of view, but with her still living, I'm not sure that would ever be feasible. It also suffers because they simply tried to cover too much time. Diary entries are frequently once a month and time passes very quickly, even though the book is longer than your typical My Story. So you've got a distant main character that's not the PoV plus time flying by making details seem too few. To add to that, it's hard to keep track of the year, because each entry is only marked with the month and day. When you've got a book covering so many years, you really need to keep track of them! I think this thing covers eight years. That's way longer than your typical kids' historical fiction, so having the year on each entry would have helped a lot. 

This one's title says it all. 19-year-old Kitty is a volunteer Red Cross nurse at a British hospital during the war. Unlike a lot of these war ones, there's no real romance tied in here. She's writing to a pilot, but realizes she has no feelings for him. There are hints of something between her and a younger doctor, but anything would be far in the future. The book is almost entirely medical experiences, which worsen as the months pass, especially after Dunkirk. 

Kitty is taking care of patients that can't be moved during an air raid and suffers burns on her hands while saving the life of one of them. She's sent home until she's healed, but she knows her life is as a nurse and vows to return.

This one is set in France with a French girl acting as a messenger for her small town's Resistance group. There's a lot of action, as the battles are taking place right there. It was interesting and pretty good.

Fighter pilot talks about being a fighter pilot. 

That's it. That's the book.

It's not bad. It's just not great either. Not much range in subject matter.

Gah, here's where I got sidetracked again. Some of these historical review posts end up being written over months or sometimes longer because I get so easily sidetracked from the reread. 

So I finished this one probably months ago and now have no recollection of it. Dangit. Just read a summary on Amazon and yeah, it was your basic Blitz story with the bombings, shelters, older brothers dying in battle, and being sent away for evacuation. The main difference is that Edie here realizes she and her younger brother are being abused by their so-called hosts, so she manages to get them back home. 

 

Kid goes into the navy to hopefully get revenge on the German U-Boat captain who killed some of his merchantman father's crew and endangered his father's life. This one is surprising well-written and engaging though. I really enjoyed it as these boys go into war stories go.

This one's about a French teen who ends up joining the Resistance and helps smuggle spies and Allies out of occupied France. Pretty decent. I like ones like these more than all the actual fighting. 

Mechanic teen joins the army as an engineer, which turns out to be someone who defuses bombs basically. And it's off to the North African front. I feel like this one was way heavier on the info than the characterization. 

I love when these are linked. The main character here is a descendant of Michael Pope, who was the main of the Crimean War book. 

This one starts out slow and its only real interest is that the main is an officer, so it's from a lesser-seen point of view. But once they hit the beach, the action picks up and it gets really good. There's even a very brief supernatural moment that isn't typically found in these types of historical fiction books, but it works. 

This one had a lot of the same elements of Spy Smuggler only it was from the point of view of the spy. The main is a French-born half-English half-French girl who loses both parents in the war. Her mother in the blitz, her father to torture as he was Resistance. When given the option to help, she takes it. The book was interesting, but I wish there was more of it. It could have been three times as long and gone into more detail about her training. As it was, the training felt rushed and then the mission felt rushed. I enjoyed it, but it could have been a lot longer and better for it. 

London Stories is an epic anthology that ties together the history of London across twelve different time periods. I really enjoyed this one. I wish they'd done more like it! 

And so that finally wraps up my My Story reread. It's taken me years to get this done. 

On the Day I Died

If you'd asked me back when I read Fatal Throne if I would read a book by the author that wrote Catherine of Aragon's random-Spanish-peppered chapter, I would have said no way. 

However, after skimming the works of all the authors, one of her books was the only one that jumped out at me as something I wanted to check out. And it was surprisingly great. 

This is an anthology of stories told by ghosts. The book begins in the present with a teen driving a car. He picks up a hitchhiker, takes her to her house, notices the saddle shoes she left in the car, goes back to the house, and is told he's driven a ghost home. Instead of him going to a cemetery to find his jacket as happens a lot, he's told to take the shoes to her grave if he wants to return them to her. He ends up finding a cemetery for teenagers...and a huge pile of saddle shoes by this girl's grave. I really enjoyed that detail. That the shoes weren't ghostly, but instead accumulated on this girl's grave, one pair returned to her each year. 

Now that he's in the cemetery though, all the other ghosts rise and want to share their stories. Each one takes place around Chicago where the cemetery is and during different years. 

Gina 1964: An Italian-American girl likes to spin untruths so when she tries to tell about her new classmate and his love of arson, she's not believed. I enjoyed this one, mostly because I liked Gina as a character. 

Johnnie 1936: Kid during the depression plays a trick on a spooky old teacher that accidentally leads to her death. He ends up becoming a runaway and gets into petty crime. Then he gets the idea to rob dead bodies in funeral homes, comes across this former teacher's, and learns why it's not a good idea to challenge anyone whose specialty is "Sumerian witchcraft." I enjoyed this one, too, though it was more because the annoying kid got what he deserved. And the idea of Sumerian witchcraft is just fun. 

Scott 2012: Know-it-all skeptic photographer wants to do a photo project in an abandoned asylum. Another annoying protagonist who gets what he deserves, though points off for it not being in an interesting way at all. 

David 1958: This one was so random. It's like a comic sci-fi horror story. I hated it because it felt so out of place with the others. 

Evelyn 1893: Set during the World's Fair, Evelyn and her twin sister are checking it out. Her sister is gorgeous and she's plain, plus the sister is also a bitch. Evelyn gets away from her and goes to a closed off floor of one exhibit building only to find an evil mirror that likes to suck in people who represent the seven deadly sins. This one was fun. I like haunted mirror stories, though no one will ever do it as well as Stephen King. 

Lily 1999: Shakespeare-obsessed girl, her boyfriend and her boyfriend's little brother in a retelling of The Monkey's Paw. I didn't hate this, but The Monkey's Paw is so well-known that it just didn't feel necessary. 

Rich 1981: Cool kid and his nerdy friend find a demonic hood ornament. Not the best but not horrid. I feel like there were some elements borrowed from Stephen King's "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut."

Edgar 1870: Mentally ill boy abused by father. Edgar Allen Poe's "Berenice" meets "The Yellow Wallpaper." I liked the fusion.

Tracy 1974: Girl is sent to briefly stay with her great aunt only to have said aunt be an ex-gangster. Not great, not awful. 

I liked the different assortment of time periods and situations so much that the overall picture of the book somehow holds up better than each individual story. If you like horror anthologies written for younger audiences, give this one a try. 

Fatal Throne

Ah, the six wives of Henry VIII. For some reason, they're my favorite Euro-based, non-Classical historical topic. I don't know why. Maybe because they're all so different yet trapped as victims of the royal system. 

This is a historical fiction book from seven points of view written by seven authors. 

M. T. Anderson writes as Henry VIII after each chapter from the PoV of a wife. Candace Fleming is Katharine of Aragon, Stephanie Hemphill does Anne Boleyn. Lisa Ann Sandell is Jane Seymour. Jennifer Donnelly tackles Anna of Cleves and Linda Sue Park is Catherine Howard. Deborah Hopkinson writes Kateryn Parr. (They varied the spellings of the Catherines to be less confusing. Though why not just use Catalina for Catherine of Aragon? It was her actual name.)

What do all those authors have in common? Pretty sure I've never heard of any of them. Oh, wait, no, Park wrote Prairie Lotus. I know one of them.

We start with Catherine of Aragon and I've only made it through her and Anne Boleyn and barely started Jane Seymour, but I can't imagine any of the sections being as annoying as Catherine's. Why? Because the author decided it would be super realistic for her to random insert Spanish phrases into practically everything. Maybe prayers I could accept, but everything? No. It sounds stupid. Catherine writes from the day she decides to fight for herself and Mary by defying the king no matter what. She flashes back to her younger days, but her story isn't ended in any of the sections. I think Anne only briefly mentions that she dies destitute and alone. I normally rather like Catherine of Aragon, but this was not her best portrayal.

The interludes by Henry between chapters are as annoying and pompous as anything you'd expect from his PoV.

Then we move to Anne Boleyn. I wonder if the authors discussed it ahead of time, but she drops French into her thoughts and speech, too, though not nearly as often as Catherine. Anne's chapter is different because it entirely takes place during her last few days with only a couple full-on flashbacks. Most of her telling of the past is her recounting it. Anne is always hard for me because she wasn't a nice person, but she also didn't deserve to die on false charges of horrible things. 

Jane Seymour's chapter is brief, as was her marriage. She's likeable, but plays the game as well as Anne, just in her own way. 

Now Anne of Cleves. That's my girl and her chapter was no disappointment. There's but a little German in it and it's only in logical places. She tells her story herself, some to a servant girl and the rest in flashbacks brought on by the painkillers given to her as she endures the final days of her battle with cancer. There's a little bit of A Christmas Carol quality to it, because some of these drug-induced flashbacks are led by an assortment of the dead, like a childhood friend, Hans Holbein and Thomas Cromwell. It's easily the best chapter so far and I won't be surprised if it's the best of the entire book.

Catherine Howard's chapter is, not surprisingly, the most sexual. She's presented as mostly endearing though. She's honestly just not that bright which is why she doomed herself. This is the one author I've read before and I like how she handled this. I'd read more of her books.

Gah, I thought I finished this and forgot. Catherine Parr has always been the least interesting one to me, even though she was arguably the most intellectual. Maybe it's because she comes at the tail end, maybe it's because her story hasn't been presented as well in anything I've watched or read. Certainly she had an interesting life. I think the issue is that she's always presented in terms of her relationship with Henry or her relationship with Elizabeth and less often on her own. This tried to do that, but it ended up falling flat. 

Overall, I quite enjoyed this and would reread it eventually. Check it out if you're into the Tudors at all.

The Friendship List Series

Normally, I put up all the book covers in a series, but I'm going to be lazy this time and only use the first one. 

There are four books in the Friendship List series.

11 Before 12 (2017)

12 Before 13 (2018)

13 and Counting (2019)

13 and 3/4 (2020)

I think that's the entire series. Greenwald definitely ended it on a note that feels final. 

The premise of all four books is the same: two best friends (Kaylan and Arianna) make a list of things to accomplish within a set time period. It begins with them doing 11 things before they turn 12 as a means of distracting themselves from the stress of starting middle school. 

As with all these middle grade books, there's a lot of friendship drama. Greenwald is the author of the TBH series I finished a few months ago and wasn't really impressed with. Friendship List is certainly a stronger series with better characters, though honestly, they're not extremely likeable. 

Kaylan is constantly worried and hates change. She definitely grows throughout the series, but she has some pretty terrible moments. In the fourth book, she learns her mother is engaged and she suspects Ari knew and didn't tell her. Ari DID know, but she chose not to tell Kaylan because she didn't want to ruin Kaylan's time while Kaylan was at camp, but mostly because that's something she needed to learn from her mother. Which is 100% true. It wasn't Ari's place to tell and the fact that Kaylan even entertains the idea that it was is why she's not particularly likeable. The best thing she has going for her is that she's a comedian. Not a lot of middle grade/YA books with girls who aspire to be in comedy. Points for that. 

Ari is the far stronger character. I enjoyed her a lot because she's Jewish and that's not just a throwaway line, but a large part of her character. You go along with her for the process of her bat mitzvah and it's quite interesting. She's a religious character with depth but it's not done in a preachy or fake-feeling way. She's also different in that while the books are centered around the friendship between the two girls, Ari feels like she's "her best self" when she's at a Jewish summer camp that Kaylan doesn't attend. And in the fourth book, she suddenly wants to go to boarding school to try to have that camp feeling all year long. She's very independent and does well on her own, unlike a lot of tween characters. 

Overall, I liked the series, but Greenwald is not the best middle grade author out there. I'm glad I read it and I'm keeping these, unlike the TBH books. I may read these again at some point.