GIRLS SURVIVE Series: Part 8

 

Every time I think this series is over, I see more new books! 

Maddy lives in the Dakota Territory in 1888. She's from St. Paul, so she's a city girl and everyone makes it clear that she isn't cut out for this kind of life. They're pretty abusive actually. 

One day in January, the weather is very nice so it's off to school for Maddy, though her aunt forces her to take her heavy cloak. It's a good thing, too. A powerful blizzard hits and Maddy and the other students are trapped in the school. 

The oldest boys head for one of their homes to get help, but too much time passes and after a window breaks, Maddy insists they need to risk getting to her home, which is very close. I love how Maddy strengthened herself and went from bullied city girl to having good suggestions and keeping everyone going. She turns her cloak into a rope that holds all the remaining students and their teacher together, and then they go out into the blizzard. It's not an easy journey and it's the stupid teacher that almost messes it up, but Maddy gets everyone to her house and earns their respect. 

This one doesn't pull any punches though. Those two older boys who never came back to the school got lost and were found frozen to death. The teacher might lose some toes and I think they mentioned others that died. Wikipedia says there were 235 fatalities. 

I enjoyed this one because I'd never heard of this incident before, and I liked Maddy as a character. 

1935 Oklahoma. Must be the Dust Bowl. 

I liked this one as much as I could. The father is horribly stubborn about leaving his family farm, but it should have been clear long before that there was no way this was going to end well. Then the family faces hatred in California and it takes them a while to get back on their feet, but they do by working together with other fellow migrants. 

I liked Millie and some of the minor characters, but I really didn't care for Millie's dad at all. He comes around eventually but still meh. 

GIRLS SURVIVE Series: Parts 5 & 6

We're going way back for the earliest-set installment of the newest batch of Girls Survive. It's time for the Black Plague. 

This book is as you'd expect it. Bleak. Set in Florence, Maria endures standing in bread lines because the city is starving and her father won't let her look for work. They've already lost her mother and her younger sister, but as the plague comes in, she loses the grandmother figure she's not actually related to, then is left with uncertainties for the others. 

Her oldest brother goes to Pisa to sell wool to earn money so they can flee to Milan, but the Florentine rulers declare no one from Pisa or Genoa can enter their city, which means her brother cannot return. 

Forced to leave without him, Maria sees her friend Joseph, who's become a grave digger, one last time. 

Then on the walk to Milan, her father contracts the plague. 

Maria is taken in by a band of travelers who will help her in Milan and her story does have a fairly happy ending, but you never know what happened to the older brother or her friend or her father. I think we can safely assume the father died and likely the friend also, but maybe there's hope for her brother. The author even mentions it in the notes at the end. 

This one is decent and fast-paced. Not boring, but definitely very bleak. 

From the Black Plague in Italy to the decks of the Mayflower. This one is decent, but suffers from what I call "Matilda Syndrome." (I call it that because in her book, Matilda from A Girl for All Time was suddenly the one who helped her cousin Katherine get with King Henry and just no.) Basically, the heroine is given a level of importance that far outweighs what a girl in her time would have or what historical evidence shows. 

So Constance slaps a bullying sailor, helps figure out how to fix the broken ship, helps the sailors save her would-be suitor who fell overboard, and breaks up an argument between grown men who are leaders of their respective communities. It's too much.  

It is good? Not from a historical standpoint. Is it enjoyable? Sure, but others in this series are far better.

This one is set during the bombing of London in WWII. Time flies in this book. Roughly half of it is spent in the early part of the war, but then the kids are evacuated to the country, where they spend over four and a half years. 

Like some of the books in this series, this book suffers from trying to cram too much time into too few pages. I didn't become attached to any of the characters and their time away from home felt like nothing because it was written in so few pages. Is it an important subject matter? Of course. But I do think it could have been handled better, perhaps in spending the entire story leading up to the evacuation and then telling what happened after in an epilogue. You're still cheated out of a good chunk of story that way, but to me, it feels like less of a cheat.

I have had this post sitting in drafts for almost a year. I left this 9/11 book because I started reading it and it felt too soon. 

It's over 20 years now, but it still feels too soon. 

The events of the book take place over a very short time. The night before. During. Short parts from the days after and then 6 months later. 

It's good. I loved the characters and their family dynamic. But I can't say it's easy to read. 

I was really surprised to see two more new books in this series! I thought they were done. 

This one covers Tulsa, which is something I admittedly don't know much about. I think the world could stand to know a lot more about this and it should be taught in every American history course. 

It is hard to read because it is a horrific incident but read it. 

 

This one is quite anticlimactic after the horrors of the previous two. It's a terrible accident, but it was an accident not terrorism. Basically, the main circus tent caught fire back in the 40s and it's the story of a girl trying to get out of there with her two twin sisters. One of the sisters is a fucking idiot and ends up stupidly risking her life instead of conquering her fear of heights. It was okay, but definitely not one of the best.