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!

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Black Cowboy

A good entry into the series, but not one of the most interesting. There's only so much you can tell about cowboys. I think it's one of those things that needs to be seen rather than read about to fully grasp it.

It's also tough to write about a town like Abilene, Kansas when you're writing for a kids' series. 

It is nice to see a black character treated almost the same as the white and Mexican cowboys right off the bat. Almost. But that shortly after the Civil War, it's a lot more than you'd expect.

Not gonna lie though, I did tear up when he had to put his horse out of its misery. Animal death always gets me, so consider yourself warned about that.

Walter Dean Myers was a celebrated and prolific author and contributed three books to the My Name Is America series, of which this one is the first.