AGHM 21 & 22

Ah, finally, the two last American Girl History Mysteries!

Ghost Light I quite liked. It's set during the late 19th Century on an island. The main character's father is part of a rescue team and the plot is mostly her trying to figure out what the mysterious light she keeps seeing is, while doing what she can to help her best friend, who's very ill. (I can't remember offhand which type of sickness she had.)

It was a good mystery, but also interesting to learn about something I didn't know much about.

It took me a while to get through Cross Creek, because it's honestly pretty boring.

Patriots vs. Loyalists trying to get the Scots on their side. Elspeth deals with a lot: family strife, a grandmother with PTSD, headstrong cousins, wanting to be friends with a new Scottish girl but not understanding why her grandmother won't let her, and balancing her life at home with her apprenticeship as a weaver.

The end is more interesting, but it doesn't save the book or redeem the characters that completely fucked up.

AGHM #15-17

I took a break from this series about a month ago and have been reading and rereading other stuff that I haven't opted to review. (Like Harry Potter.)

Part of the reason I took a break was this book. I liked the 1724 Charlestown setting, but other than that, meh. It's a mystery involving pirates, a bitchy potential stepmother and a pack of lies. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either and it just didn't keep my attention long.

Whistler in the Dark was much better. I made myself slog through Skull Island a couple days ago and then picked this one up. It's set in 1867 in a brand new Colorado town. The  main character's mother is a widow who knows how to run a newspaper so she takes herself and her daughter out to Colorado to start the town's paper. Once there, they find that the man who hired the mother painted the town a much prettier picture than it actually is and that at least one person isn't fond of a woman running a paper. As the troubles grow, the main character finds herself with multiple mysteries to solve. It's pretty fast-paced and interesting.

Chilkoot Pass I just finished. It's set during the 1897 Klondike gold rush. It's got interesting characters, which help move the story forward, because they're basically just packhorses the entire story. They just pack their shit and move it and unpack it and eat and sleep, then repeat. Only the adult characters get the joy of moving things repeatedly. It blows my mind that people were that eager for gold that they actually did this crap.

The mystery plot has the main character trying to find a thief in their midst. Money goes missing not once but twice. The first is never solved, but the second one is. But it's not the same person that's taken the rest of their smaller items.

The main wants to be a writer, so I can relate to her there. There's something likeable about her, even though she's not as dynamic as some of the other leads in this series.

The author unfortunately only contributed this one book to the series, as well as a Samantha mystery, which I remember being a pretty good one.

AGHM #8-10

Under Copp's Hill is one of my favorites in this series, so it's nice that it follows Suzette's book, which is another favorite. Innie is almost as awesome as Suzette.

Innocenza is an orphan girl living in Boston's North End in 1908 with her controlling grandmother, her aunt and uncle, and various cousins. Her best friend is her cousin Teresa, whose older sister Carmela tells the girls about a new settlement house for immigrant children where they learn dancing, singing and some household tasks, as well as being able to borrow books from the library. Part of the settlement house is a pottery where Carmela works as a painter.

The troubles at the settlement house start shortly after the weekly library clubs begin meeting and while investigating, Innie brings negative attention to herself. Despite the blame, she is determined to solve the mystery with help from her new Russian Jewish friend Matela and a usually reluctant Teresa.

The mystery is a decent one in which you discover the means well before the perpetrator. Innie's personal struggles with thinking she's been promised to the Catholic nuns against her wishes are another part of the story, as well as Carmela's struggle to earn citizenship. The Italian male sexism in the story is not welcome, but sadly historically accurate. Pretty sad when the women in the household are the only actual citizens yet you don't respect their ability to read and write when your own sucks! Ugh, men.

But yeah, great book, great characters. Innie and Matela are both awesome.

And so we follow two good ones with this dud. Southern family at the end of the Civil War. Dad's still off fighting. Just received word older brother died. The mystery is the deserter in the woods and the thief around the farm. Same person? Maybe, maybe not. Oh, wait, there's a young Yankee soldier, too.

It's not a horrible book and the mystery is decent, but what bothers me is all the anti-Yankee talk without one word about how the South sucked for supporting slavery. Usually in these Southern point of view books, the lead character isn't a complete dick about slavery, but there's nary a mention of it here. That's this book's largest flaw.

You can expect something decent from the author of Julie's books and one Dear America, although others might know her better as the Just Moody author. I've never read any of those.

Glasshouse is, I think, the oldest book in the series, being set in 1621 Jamestown.

Merry is forced into indentured servitude. Like she's actually kidnapped and forced into it. She got shanghaied, but for indentured servitude in the New World, not being on a ship's crew.

Her only friend is an Italian glassblower that's a little older than her, so she gets lucky when the people to pick her for indenture are the ones that own the glasshouse.

However, she's stuck living with the complete asshole that runs the place (not owns it) and his even more assholish, abusive wife. She enjoys her time in the glasshouse though, except then things start to go bad. A batch of glass is destroyed when the fires are let to burn out in the kilns, which take weeks to heat up enough to work again. Once that's fixed, someone breaks the entire batch of finished glass, and then the owner of the glasshouse is suspiciously dead. No answers ever come in that, but I suspect the asshole wife poisoned him. Merry's pal Angelo is framed, but she takes the blame and sits in prison instead, then escapes. Shortly after, she catches the asshole wife in the act and everything comes to light. She's awarded her freedom, then learns her older sister arrived as a tobacco bride, so everything works out for her in the end.

Merry's a good character, not too weak, not overly strong as would seem anachronistic in such an early setting. The mystery was good, too, and the story moved along at a good pace.

AGHM #4-7

Voices at Whisper Bend takes place during 1942, so we've got a lot of the same elements we see in Molly's books. Helping on the homefront and such.

Charlotte's father operates a tugboat, so he's still at home, though her older brother is off fighting.

Charlotte gets the idea for a scrap metal drive, but when the scrap all disappears, she's got a lot of leads to follow and finds some unlikely allies along the way.

The story is pretty well-written, although Charlotte's PTSD from an incident in the river when she was young is hard to read. It's frustrating when you're reading all their suffering and it would be better if she'd just friggin' TELL someone, but she doesn't. It comes to a head when she's forced...literally forced...to help her father on the tugboat.

There's a lot going on in this one and kind of a lot of characters, but it flows pretty well. The author also did AGHM #8, which I'm reading right now.

It's the suffrage book. Yaaaaaay.

This one takes place in 1914 New York City when an Irish family of a widowed mother, the heroine and her two younger sisters take in an English boarder who turns out to be a pretty major figure in the suffrage movement.

Not that she tells anyone that. The mother ends up tossed in jail, but it's not obvious to the heroine, although it is painfully obvious and frustrating to the reader. I hate books where adults deliberately hide things from kids and this is one of those.

It's not a horrible suffrage book, but the entire mystery wouldn't exist if adults would just treat children like real people.

We've got the same problem in this one. Bessie's mother has TB, which is apparently some big horrible deal back in 1928, so her father takes her and her younger brother and runs away to Harlem.

Without telling the kids a damn thing.

I mean, come the fuck on. Tell them the mother's sick but don't tell them what it is if TB is such a freak out-worthy thing.

So of course Bessie thinks her dad's abandoned her mom and he's all stupidly secretive about what he's doing in Harlem for work and Bessie goes running all over trying to solve the mystery.

The cover highlights one of the worst bits. No one is going to think a 12-year-old kid is an adult. Also, no 12-year-old kid is going to immediately be able to walk in heels like Bessie apparently can.

It's not a horrible book. The setting and time period are excellent. I wish AG would do a Harlem Renaissance girl and this book just fueled that want even more. But another hiding things from kids turns into a mystery book and even worse this time is annoying and takes away from what's good about the story.

Ah, this one. I love this one. Kathleen Ernst steps up to the plate here. She wrote 3 books in this series, plus several historical character mysteries and the Caroline series.

Suzette is an awesome character. She's half-Ojibwe and half-French, so she's caught in between two worlds, but as she says in the end, she wouldn't have been able to solve the mystery without skills from each part of her.

This is set in 1732, so it's one of the earliest of the series.

Excellent characters here, excellent mystery. Suzette is actually almost treated like an adult and she's got a lot of freedom to do as she pleases, so she can get things done.

AGHM #2 and #3

Hoofbeats of Danger I quite liked. It takes place in Nebraska Territory in 1860 at a Pony Express station. Annie, another plucky 11-year-old, has a favorite express horse and when she begins acting crazily, it's up to Annie to solve the mystery with the help of her half-Shoshone healer friend and Bill Cody himself in his younger years.

This one's got a lot of action and the mystery keeps plugging along at a good pace.

The only thing that took me out of the story a bit is that the horse is named Magpie, which is of course Kaya's hated nickname. There was a blonde Caroline in Smuggler's Treasure set during Historical Caroline's War of 1812 so that was a bit distracting, too.

Unfortunately, this was author Holly Hughes' only contribution to the series.

Set during WWII in ruralish North Carolina, the Night Flyers is about 12-year-old Pam, who lives with her mother on a small farm while her father is off being a soldier. Pam struggles in school and with the abuse of her mother's boss's bratty son. Who never gets his. Not really. The douche. A strange man with a maybe-German accent comes asking about her precious pigeons, which are prize winners she's raised with her father. He wants them because they're night flyers and will pay her hundreds for even one breeding pair. But when the pigeons start to go missing and Pam's incredibly stupid ass mother tries to make her abandon the half-wolf dog she's trained, Pam gets into a much bigger adventure than she planned, although the culprit ends up being much closer to home.

At least she gets to keep her well-trained guard dog! He was the best part of this book.

This one was by Elizabeth McDavid Jones, who wrote 3 Felicity mysteries, 1 for Kit, and 4 others in this series.