Finishing Up the Reread

The final books! I honestly put some away already and can't remember for sure if this is all of them, but dammit, it's close enough.

After the onslaught of WWII books, it was nice to read something else. Biddy Owens' journal is mostly about baseball, but there's quite a bit of other stuff in there, too, which you can imagine. It's good. I enjoyed it, even for a sports-themed book!

Rose's diary takes place in 1948, after the war, but she's been tasked to write by the father in the third home she's been in since she came to Canada. He wants her to remember what happened to her and write it down, as a means of helping her regain some semblance of normalcy. It's hard to read Rose's diary both because of the Holocaust flashback sections and because the sister in this third home is a bitch. She's a nasty fucking brat who bullies people with her friends. They don't pick on Rose outright, but she never is welcoming to her, which is ridiculous. That's not how you treat people who went through what anyone who survived the Holocaust did. The worst thing is that she gets what she wants: Rose out of the house and never gets a comeuppance like she and her gang of bitches deserves. Rose is happy to go though, because she's actually wanted by her best friend's lively family. It's a good book, but frustrating for sure.

The next book in chronological order is These Are My Words. I reviewed this when it was new and I'd finished reading it, so look for it here:
http://redblackandwhitebookreviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/dear-canada-residential-school.html

1968 is the final year covered by any of these series. In an unusual turn, the same author wrote two books: one for Dear America and one for My Name Is America. The DA chronicles the younger sister of the teenager in the MNIA. I always read the DA books first, so I began with Molly.

She's quite a smart girl, although maybe not so much with boys. Much of her diary revolves around news from her brother Patrick, who's in Vietnam, and her trying to figure out how she feels about the war and what she wants to do about it.

Patrick's book is almost solely about what happens in Vietnam, not much about things back home. The fault of a pair of books like this is that no matter which you read, you find out what happens to the characters and that makes the endings a little less interesting.

Patrick's book was mostly just sad though. Almost everyone dies.

And the final one, which I just finished up last night, is the last Dear Canada anthology. Unlike the three Christmas ones, this is completely new stories with completely new characters and even some of the authors never wrote for the series.

There are some really good entries here and things aren't what you expect. Very few of the stories take place before the 1900s. There were a couple rough ones though. One was unsatisfying because the poor girl was abused by her parents and it being a short story, there's no resolution. Another was so off the wall, I wouldn't even consider it historical and I don't think it had any place in this book. But it was a decent end to this reread that's taken me ages, and now all my Dear America books and spinoffs are nicely packed away in my storage closet, and I have a large stack of other historical fiction to make my way through!

First, we're tackling the American Sisters series, then the three books in Journey to America, and then the American Diaries series. After that, I will probably move on to the UK's version of Dear America, which is called My Story. I'm going to go check those right now, because I think I'm missing some of the newer ones.

WWII Part 4

The LAST section of World War 2 books. You have no idea how sick of these I am.

I skimmed most of these. I've read all but one before.

This first one isn't bad, but the horrible epilogue kinda ruins the entire book.

Not that it's written poorly, like a Barry Denenberg lazy epilogue, but it's horrible what happens. I don't really feel it was a necessary addition to the story.

Sniper Fire I read through, because I'd never read it before. It's not bad if you don't mind a book of almost non-stop battles and if you can get past the cover guy looking like some relative of James Franco.

Not the worst of the I Am Canada war books by far, mostly because it's different. It drops you right into the battles and you stay there. There's no "I grew up idolizing this dude and went to war with him and one of us met a chick and this other buddy died and blah blah blah." It's not the formulaic I Am Canada.

Off to My Name Is America. This one reads as very disjointed, which actually makes it more believable as an actual soldier's diary.

It's very short and it goes by really quickly. Like doesn't go in depth very much. I feel like you learn more about the cast of characters in the epilogue than you do in the main journal.

And this last IAC, I fully admit I cracked open the cover, groaned and set it on the finished pile. I'm too sick of WWII to do it. I don't remember hating this one though. It's got the Resistance and the guys end up in Buchenwald, so there's a lot of depth here.

But I'm so happy to be done with WWII that I don't even care that the next book is about baseball!

WWII: Part 2

Three more from the WWII section of the Dear America and spinoff series.

Maddie Beck and her mother live with a group of people in a boarding house on Long Island, while Mr. Beck is away in his role as a naval officer.

Maddie reminds me a bit of an amped up version of Molly McIntire. She's very concerned about her dad and follows the news more closely than Molly does. And she strives to do something for the war effort, like Molly, but surpasses Molly's abilities by forming a group called Kids Fight for Freedom, alongside her best friend and soon-to-be-boyfriend Johnny. Actually, Maddie's like a combination of Molly and Kit. I feel like Kit really knew how to get shit done and Maddie's got that.

After her father's hurt, Maddie withdraws a lot, but then gets caught up in one of the most unrealistic plots in Dear America history. Not quite as sensational as some of the reboot books, but it's definitely up there! You'll have to read it to see what I mean.

It's a good addition to the DA series and I think it's one of the better ones about WWII.

Piper's story concerns how she and her family react to the internment of the Japanese in Seattle. Her father is a pastor for the Japanese Baptist church, while her older brother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack. For way too long, Piper is caught up in boy/girl drama while only occasionally thinking about what she should be doing and feeling about how she's seen her friends in the Japanese community treated. She eventually strays away from her white friends and asshole boyfriend and becomes friends with Betty Sato, a girl that attends her dad's church. She becomes more involved in what's going on, once the Japanese are rounded up and taken to their first relocation spot. When his congregation is moved to Minidoka in Idaho, Piper's dad decides to go along and take her with him. She has a fit at first, but gradually becomes happier with the people around her than she ever was back in Seattle, despite the hard circumstances and outside racist assholes.

I think this is one of the better reboot Dear Americas, although I did wonder a bit at why they chose a white girl to tell this story. Just like I wondered why a white girl had the Pearl Harbor book. There is a My Name Is America about a boy at one of the internment camps, so maaaaaaaybe that's why they chose to go this route, but meh. On the other hand though, I love anything that educates about this deplorable incident in American history.

Turned Away is sort of like My Secret War, only set in Canada. There are a few differences though.

First, the family is Jewish.

Second, Devorah has older brothers in the war, not her father.

Third, she doesn't spend nearly enough time on war things and sees way too many fucking movies! I swear, this chick is at the movies every other damn day. And she reads Agatha Christie constantly. Like I get that you're setting the time period, but dude, it's a historical fiction novel, not a pop culture 1940s book. And stop eating so much fucking popcorn. I don't even know how many times she bitched about a too-much-popcorn stomachache.

Fourth, the book constantly flip flops between being super serious and the movies/murder mysteries frivolity. It's a bit annoying. She has family trapped in France, including a cousin that writes to her as much as she can, and their story is utterly heartwrenching, yet on the next page, it's back to the damn movies. There are a lot of question sessions with her dad where she asks these ridiculous, impossible to answer big questions, too.

It was decent, I suppose, but mostly it just annoyed me. Part of that is because it was appalling to learn how few Jewish refugees Canada took in. They deliberately kept people out, because some antisemitic fuck was in charge. Nicely done, Canada. Not that the US has a perfect track record, but Canada is effin' huge and they could have taken in tens of thousands of people and they didn't. I believe the number mentioned in the historical note in the back of the book was 5,000. They took in 5,000 people. The US took in 200,000. Let that sink in and then try to read this without getting massively pissed. So much awful shit happened during WWII that having to read all these in a row is getting more and more difficult!

DEAR CANADA: Red River

This is going to be a short one, because honestly, I found this book really dull. It's one of the first four DC books and it's just a snoozer. The cast is either not fleshed-out well or genuinely unlikeable. I hate that the bratty obnoxious girl that plagues the diary-writer for most of the book ends up with her pretty cool older brother. Like...why? You see explanations for a change in her character, but no actual proof of them. Huge chunks of time pass because the writer is either too busy or too cold to write. Events happen out of the blue with no previous development.

I think this is realistic in that it's probably what most actual diaries read like. Not many people have the free time to write detailed entries almost daily. But realism doesn't equal a good read.