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 3

Torn Apart is a bit different than the Dear America internment camp book, but it's actually less graphic. The majority of the book doesn't even take place in the camp. It's odd, but I feel like the DA book with the white main character captured the problems Japanese Americans and Canadians faced better than the DC book with the Japanese Canadian main character. This was good, but it felt tamed down somewhat. It should be hard to read these stories, because this was one of the most embarrassing and terrible times in American/Canadian history, but that wasn't there so much with Mary's book. I do like Mary and the other characters, but I think the Dear America and My Name Is America books tackled the subject better.

Defend or Die is the last in the 1941-starting books. The main character is a Canadian soldier in one of the Japanese-run PoW camps in Hong Kong. The story flashes back and forth between the present day and him recalling what happened as he writes it into a blank book he found. This is definitely one of the best I Am Canada books. It's a not often discussed subject and it's written incredibly well. I'm not big into the war-focused boy books, but this one is well worth the read.

Unlike the other internment diaries, Ben's takes place mostly in the camp. He's got a very different attitude than Piper and Mary, choosing to focus on playing baseball (it got boring in parts because it was too much baseball) and ignoring school. Ben doesn't exactly get a fair deal though, because like a lot of the MNIA series, the book is short and Ben rushes through a lot of things and doesn't do in depth about much.

This is also another of Denenberg's epilogue failures. The character of Mike does a couple dumb things and then isn't mentioned again until the epilogue when he's shot and killed doing an attempted robbery. Nothing about Ben's father's damaged state of mind is ever explained. Only tiny details about a few characters are given, although it's still better than Early Sunday Morning's epilogue.

Ben's book is the first that begins in 1942, but I wanted to place it here with these two, because the topic shift is going entirely to battle. No more internment, just battle after battle for the next four books. Then I think we're finally done with the war!

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!

WWII: Part 1

I'm faced with a buttload of World War II books. I was going to try to read through a few more before my first write-up, but the last one I read annoyed me, so I'm just doing these four for now.

The WWII section of the Dear America series and its spinoffs begins with a "Special Edition" by Barry Denenberg. There's nothing about this book that really makes it a special edition and I can't remember if any others ever were. It's well-written, but the first half takes place in Vienna and Julie's Jewish, so you're in for some hard to read stuff. The epilogue is also hard to read. Very good, very important story, but definitely hard to read.

Dear Canada's first WWII book is much more light-hearted. It's practically not about the war at all. The family takes in an English War Guest child and their neighbors get her brother, so there's some detail about the Blitz, but it's not like they're actually taking part in it. The older brother goes into the...navy, I think? It's been a bit since I finished this. So there's the worrying about a relative aspect, but a lot of this is just daily life stuff. It's not bad, just not that involved.

Gonna be honest and admit that I just skimmed this. Sometimes I'm in the mood for war stuff, and this time I wasn't. The boy war books just don't interest me. Argh. The Dear America ones tend to be better, but I Am Canada just seems really repetitive and, as I've mentioned before, formulaic. And there are four more of them in the series and every single one is WWII. I should force myself to read the others. I think two of them are ones I never even read, but I know I've read this one before.

And this one. This is the book that annoyed me so much that I had to get these reviews done.

This is Barry Denenberg again, but this time he fails horribly. He's got engaging, interesting characters, but the book is quite simply TOO SHORT. Not enough time is spent with them, events are covered far too briefly, some things aren't explained and all, and worst of all, the epilogue is pathetic and gives only the barest info about three of the characters. Not even the entire family!

I feel like Denenberg bit off more than he could chew. He was producing a book a year for these series and I'm thinking there were some he rushed through. In 1996, he did the Civil War, then the Irish mill girl (another short one) in 1997. In September 1998, he did the Revolutionary War, followed by the Japanese internment camp in 1999, Julie's diary in 2000 and then this Pearl Harbor one in 2001. I think this was his last gasp and it suffered really terribly for it. Thankfully, the one after was the blind girl and hers was good. I just wish he'd put much more thought into this book and realized how bad the epilogue in particular was. It's like he just didn't care about the characters he created and didn't think that maybe his readers might!

DEAR AMERICA & MY NAME IS AMERICA: Dust Bowl

Well, we're still in the Depression, but some areas of the country have upped the ante and their residents are suffering from humongous dust storms.

We have both Dear America and My Name Is America tales from this time period, but they face the problem in different ways.

The Dear America book tells of a family who won't leave the Texas panhandle, despite numerous setbacks, while the MNIA story is about a family that leaves Oklahoma for California.

The different experiences overlap, of course. The girl in the Dear America has a friend who tells her about the California experience, and the boy from MNIA has a friend and an aunt who remain in Oklahoma.

I preferred the characters and stories from the Dear America book, although I did like the traveling bit in MNIA. Naturally, the characters in the MNIA deal with more abuse. Californians were embarrassingly unwelcome to these poor people that needed help. Too bad they couldn't have been shipped off to live in dust for a month and see how they liked it. But history always has been and always will be full of assholes!

Next up, we're up in Canada for a girl who has polio and then we begin the loooooonnnng stretch of World War II.

DEAR CANADA: Depression

Oh, man, this took forever to get through. Definitely one of the most boring ones.

This book isn't so much about the depression as it is the problems Jews faced in Depression-era Toronto. I feel like she's talking about the same thing over and over, and she talks so much about her cousin that it may as well be his diary.

It's just not interesting. I appreciate that the author used the experiences of his parents to write a book, but it was not enough to make a good story.

The Christmas short story for this is actually better than the book itself, because they lay off the talk about Hitler and riots and "stick with your own kind" for a change.