AMERICAN GIRL: Julie

JULIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I'm a big Julie fan. I cannot reiterate enough how wild it is that I let these reviews go unfinished for so long. But I am glad that my last brand new AG historical mystery reading experience is going to be with Julie, because her newest mystery is one I never read. I really wish they kept up with the mysteries. I miss the historical cast. 

Julie was the ninth historical character released. I remember very fondly seeing her in AGPNY for the first time. I picked out Ivy as my first doll in 2007 and it took me until 2009 to finally get Julie. I bought a lot in between. I'm not sure why it took me so long to finally cave on her, but she remains one of my big faves. 

Just for fun, this is the picture I took in AGPNY in 2007 when I first saw her and it was this look that made me want the doll. 

Julie's first three books are mostly about her dealing with changes in her life. Her parents are divorced and she, her older sister Tracy and their mother move to a new apartment above the store their mother has opened. Julie is upset to be moving away from her father, her pet rabbit (the new apartment is no pets) and her best friend Ivy, who lives across the street. She's also changing schools, so she has to try to make new friends. She meets a boy, TJ, who plays basketball with her, and she figures she can try out for the team, but the coach says no girls on the boys' team. Yet there is no girls' team, so by the new Title IX, she should be allowed to play. The coach remains difficult, so Julie gets 150 signatures on a petition. He throws it out in front of her and later, she and TJ dig it out of the trash. She takes it to the principal, and he brings it to the school board. Julie is then allowed to play on the team. (I thought that a bit odd, because she should have at least had to try out. What if she sucked?) 

In her second book, Julie has an autobiographical class project that she struggles with, because she doesn't want to talk about the divorce as the worst thing that ever happened to her. She breaks her finger in a big basketball game and initially talks about that in her tape-recorded project, but in the end, she tells the class about the divorce. 

The holiday third book is about the new differences Julie and Tracy deal with as Divorced Kids (as Kristy Thomas would call them). Julie handles herself much better than teenage Tracy, though Tracy finally reconciles with their father. Julie spends a lot of time with Ivy and we learn about 1970s Chinese New Year celebrations in Chinatown. 

The fourth book finds us in spring and Julie and Ivy discover a baby owl in the park. They bring it to a wildlife rescue where it's sent on to a vet. While there, Julie sees a pair of bald eagles who lost their home due to housing development. They have two babies but they're not doing well in captivity, and one ends up dying. Julie fights to get money for the eagles to be rehabbed outside and slowly integrated back into nature. She celebrates her birthday on the same day the eagles are released. 

Julie finds herself celebrating the Bicentennial in her fifth book. Her dad flies her and Tracy out to Pittsburgh, where they join this huge wagon train that's travelled west to east, aiming for Valley Forge. They ride in the wagon with their aunt, uncle and cousin April. Julie loves the Little House books, which she even brought with her, and she wants to try riding a horse, but her first experience doesn't go well. She's riding bareback and April lets go of the rope so the horse bolts and Julie is thrown into a river. She could have been seriously hurt but none of the adults take this seriously. Then she's mad at her cousin (rightfully) and scared of the horse (less rightfully, as it was her cousin's fault, not the horse's) for a bit. She finally just gets over it, but this was the stupidest thing in her books. So unrealistic. Then the wagon gets stuck and they have to leave some of their stuff behind. Also unrealistic that it's made it the entire way across the country only to have weight issues now. Then Julie and her cousin ride the horse ten miles away and ten miles back to collect the signature of the oldest man in Pennsylvania. They've made up and Julie is over her horse fear. The scroll with his signature is stolen and of course Julie is the one to get it back, so she gets to shake hands with President Ford at the end. Definitely by far the weakest of Julie's books. She goes too heroic and the adult reaction to her falling off the horse was highly unrealistic. 

In her sixth book, Julie is back in school and now in the fifth grade. She's made a new friend, a deaf girl named Joy that's the new girl this year. Sadly, a lot of the other students are too afraid of her to befriend her. When Julie and Joy are unfairly sent to detention and have to write sentences, Julie realizes detention is useless. She and Joy decide to run for president and vice president, even though it's always been a sixth grader who's won. The only other candidate is sixth grade's most popular boy, who's as useless as writing sentences in detention. Though the girls struggle with sexism and ableism, Julie and Joy come out on top, even winning over the Water Fountain Girls, who like the sign language Julie taught them and finally see Joy as a person. I enjoyed this one. There's regular human drama, but it's not the family drama of the first three books. My only real criticism is that the teacher never sees that she was wrong for giving the two girls detention when Joy was just asking Julie to explain something she couldn't lip read. You try lip reading "Sacajawea," Mrs. Duncan. 

Julie is best when she's at home dealing with her family and friends. That's when she shines the most. The eagles were an okay departure, but the wagon train book was pretty horrible. She's still a very loveable addition to the historical cast and it was nice to see the 70s included in the line. Ivy is also one of my faves of the best friend cast and Joy is great, too. As is TJ really. He's no Stirling, but he's a good guy. 

Ivy's book is great. She's having minor issues with her family. Her mom is in law school and her dad works two jobs, so they get food from the grandparents' restaurant a lot and Ivy is tired of Chinese food. She misses when her mom cooked and had time to talk to her. Same with her dad. She's got a family project for Chinese school and neither of her parents makes time to talk to her. She's also envious of her brother and how well he does in everything. 

Then she's got a gymnastics tournament coming up and she's weak on the beam, because she fell last time and has lost her confidence. 

A new conflict comes up when she realizes her family reunion is the same day as her tournament. Her dad basically demands she go to the reunion because he apparently pays zero attention to her and knows nothing about her life. Her mom sticks up for her and says how hard Ivy worked, how she's part of a team and that this is the all-city tournament so it's kind of a big deal. Yeah, law school Mom still pays attention. Ivy's dad kinda sucks and doesn't really redeem himself. He says he realizes how important it is and stops pressuring her to pick the reunion but still. 

Ivy chooses her tournament and then skips the pizza party after so she can come to the reunion. Duh. How come nobody figured that out before? She kicks butt in the tournament, wins medals, and the team gets second place overall, so she finally gets some confidence. And at the reunion, she sees what a great family she has and appreciates them. 

I liked everyone in Ivy's book except for her dad. I wish he'd had a scene to redeem himself a bit and show that he is involved in his daughter's life, but it didn't happen. 

Julie's first mystery is a good book, but a fairly simple mystery. There's a new girl in class named Carla and it's quickly obvious that she's been telling lies. She talks about having a big family, living in one of the famous Painted Lady houses, having a really smart dog, and working with her doctor/detective father on a case. 

Julie takes a little too long to fully confront Carla and get the truth out of her. I would have done it much faster. Turns out Carla's dad abandoned his family, they're poor because her mother is trying to go to school and work, and she has one older brother who is a wounded Vietnam vet. 

Julie doesn't forgive Carla immediately, but she does invite her and her mother to the Thanksgiving gathering Hank and Julie's mom are planning, which includes more of the wounded vets. Julie gets Todd, Carla's brother there, and even thinks of a plan to help the family, though it isn't realized in the book itself. 

It's a good book but only an okay mystery. Like I said, it's super obvious that Carla is lying. The mystery is the why.

I'll be including the Beforever covers for these because they're pretty. 

The original cover has a confused Julie leaving Carla in her Painted Lady house, which isn't actually hers. 

The Beforever cover features Julie looking at her "pet" spider. She really wants a dog but can't have one and she misses Nutmeg, so she adopts a spider living outside her window. I love the row of Painted Ladies at the bottom. 

This one is so great. Julie finds an old note written in Chinese in some clothes donated from Chinatown by Ivy's grandmother. When she brings the note with her to dinner at the Happy Panda, Ivy's grandmother is overjoyed and tells her story. She came over from China in 1919 and was held at Angel Island, where a lot of Chinese immigrants were detained. They were questioned incredibly thoroughly, even very young children, to prove they had relatives in the US, as the immigration policies were becoming stricter and only relatives were allowed in. The note was a coaching note written by Ivy's grandmother's mother, who never made it to the US and died while Ivy's grandmother was still being detained. She's thrilled to have some piece of her mother returned to her. She'd thought she lost the note and never saw it, not realizing it slipped into the lining of the jacket Julie found it in. 

Then the mystery comes in. There are lines in the note about a doll precious to Ivy's grandmother, saying she sleeps with it every night and she should give it to her father when she gets to the US. Ivy's grandma says there wasn't a precious doll, as she was too old for dolls, but a simple rag doll made by one of the village women to accompany her. 

That night, Ivy's grandparents' place is robbed and the only things taken are Julie and Ivy's dolls. They find Ivy's with her head popped off in the trash behind the restaurant. Julie's is found later in the trash by Ivy's Chinese school.

Smart Julie realizes the thief thinks something special is inside a doll. She remembers Ivy's grandmother was supposed to bring a valuable jade necklace that was her father's so he could sell it and get money they needed in the US. But without the coaching note, Ivy's grandmother never saw those lines about the doll and she left it with her orphan friend from the journey over. Julie realizes the jade necklace was inside the doll.

So the search for Mei Meng, Ivy's grandmother's friend, is on. Julie and Ivy eventually find her, but the thief gets to her house before they do. He isn't able to steal anything though, because Mei has brought the doll with her to the hospital, where she's recovering from a fall. They open the doll and find the necklace. 

Julie finally figures out who the thief is and confronts him. There were a couple decent red herrings and it isn't super obvious right away who it is. 

A good mystery with some great history on Angel Island and the struggles of being a Chinese immigrant in the early 20th century. 

This cover isn't nearly as good as the orignal. Julie's making a weird face and there isn't even anything doll-related on it. 

This one is not my favorite. During a benefit auction, TJ gets a job working for the rich people who are holding the auction. That's the big WTF of the book right there. Mrs. Vernon may be Julie's mother's friend, but why would rich people who have a huge, expensive collection of rare objects pick a random kid to have access to their house just to feed their cat? 

TJ's interested in the silver guitar owned by his favorite, now-deceased guitar player, so he takes it down to hold it, the cat jumps on him, and it breaks. When he and Julie go to get it fixed, the music store owner is pissed because it's clearly not a real guitar. So now Julie and TJ are on the hunt for the thieves. 

They have their usual suspects: the lazy nephew who lives with the Vernons, the housekeeper who lied about why she had to go out of town, the busybody neighbor, the kid from the music store who wants his own guitar and has been following them, and even the Vernons themselves. But no, those are all wrong. It was Julie's former upstairs neighbors, photographers who were in the house taking photos for the next auction catalog. They get hired to take photos of rare items, figure out what they can most profit from, make fake replicas, swap them out, and then sell the real things and move on to their next victims. 

It's just not as good as the other mysteries. It was mostly on the boring side.

Lost in the City has Julie parrot-sitting over spring break. Ivy's uncle has given the Lings his African Gray parrot, Lucy. He's not happy about it, but it's what his soon-to-be wife wants. After seeing how Lucy bonded with Julie, the uncle asks her to pet sit, while the rest of the family is off to get him married. Julie happily agrees. 

On the second day, Julie finds the window and cage open and Lucy is nowhere to be found. She starts searching and soon has a decent list of suspects. 

First, there's the older couple who are staying on the lower floor of the Lings house while the wife recovers from...surgery, I think? The husband is kinda rude and says something to make him a suspect. 

Then there's Julie's vegetarian, vaguely hippie aunt, who's staying with Julie's dad while she looks for an apartment near her new job. 

Finally, there's Gordon, a former classmate of Ivy's who's moved nearby. He's unhappy because his parents are getting divorced. His biggest red flag is that he needed a new jacket and commented that it would take a long time to save for one, then suddenly he turns up in a super expensive leather jacket. Julie thinks he sold Lucy for the jacket money. 

It's not a bad mystery, but it's no Paper Daughter. 

I'm finally going to read the last Julie mystery! As mentioned, I have never read this. It's my final unread AG historical book featuring the older characters. Sigh. 

Paper Daughter is still my favorite Julie mystery, but this one is an easy second. 

Julie and her mom are off to a commune near Sonoma that was started by Julie's aunt Nadine and her husband David. They learn David lives in town now, thanks to an injury from Vietnam. Nadine wasn't happy he went to war, so they're hovering around a divorce, leaving their son Raymond, who's around Julie's age, very unhappy. 

The commune is struggling with money. The only other kid around Julie and Raymond's age is Dolores. She's older, but I can't remember by how much. But she's working at a cafe in town. David has a job in town and an apartment. Raymond sadly doesn't see his dad as much as he wants to. 

There are two mysteries. The first is all the random weird happenings around the commune. The chickens get out. The clean laundry hits the ground. The calf goes missing. 

The second is the mystery of the nearby mine. Raymond and Julie hear tapping in there, and Julie finds a red bottle with a message inside that looks quite old. 

There are several suspects, but I had it figured out pretty early on. Doesn't mean it's not a good story though! 

And that wraps up Julie Albright, I'm sorry to say. I really love Julie. I've got Claudie's second book that I'm going to read next and then I'm done with AG historicals until Isabel and Nicki's book comes out in a few months. Wah. I want more historical stuff.