Month: March 2017

Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba

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Can you believe I only have a few more of these novels? I have enjoyed the Royal Diaries so much more as an adult than as a kid, when I thought a lot of them were kind of boring.

Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba, Angola, Africa, 1595, Patricia McKissack, 2000.

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My first complaint with my specific copy of this book is that the library pasted a huge sticker of the world with some reading-around-the-world challenge nonsense on it, and….why would you make that permanent? You know other people will read this book after the challenge ends, right? But that’s my own specific complaint.

Anyway, Patricia McKissack is a great writer, so my first complaint is that this book is so short. Some of the Royal Diaries books are behemoths and some of them are skinny little things, and this one clocks in at just eighty-six pages of story. That’s barely anything! That’s not enough! The tricky thing with some of these books that are about women in cultures without a tradition of writing is that they have to come up with a gimmick to make it work (some are better than others—when I get to Weetamoo, you’ll see), and this one works particularly well. Nzingha is being taught to read and write in Portuguese from Father Giovanni, a Portuguese captive in the royal court of Nzingha’s father, Kiluanji, the ruler of the Mbundu kingdom. The Portuguese have begun to make dramatic inroads in what is now Angola in an effort to conquer more land, and while Nzingha hates what they stand for, she thinks it isn’t a terrible idea to know more about what they’re thinking.

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Tempestuous: Opal’s Story

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This book is so weird. It feels like it goes on for ages and ages and ages and never actually manages to go anywhere interesting? Thankfully, it’s the last one in this trash fire of a series, so buckle up because this is a bad one.

Tempestuous: Opal’s Story, Jude Watson, 1996.

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This is the Very Special Episode of this series, because it’s about a Black Woman, and while it makes a good effort at actually talking about race relations, it mostly falls flat because the writing isn’t all that good and the characters are hilariously flat and also Opal kind of sucks. She is the classic example of “Maybe the grass is greener on the other side? No it isn’t! It sucks over there! Maybe my first boyfriend will take me back!??!”

Also, let’s talk about the cover art. Opal is a seamstress, so she should be wearing a beautiful hand-sewn creation she made for herself, but I swear to God this outfit looks way more like buckskin and a skirt over trousers. I get that it’s a trick of shadow, but like…that’s the best outfit you could give her? It’s not even a colour. It’s non-colour with an orange stripe. Opal, you can do better than this.

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I Am Regina

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The only thing—literally the only thing at all—I remembered about this book was the cover, because there was a copy in my library growing up and I thought the girl on the front was a vengeful ghost spirit or something. Can I also note that the cover blurb “Related with all the impact of a hard-hitting documentary” is A) false and B) not a great pull quote, either?

I Am Regina, Sally M. Keehn, 1991.

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As this blog goes on and on we delve deeper and deeper into the realms of “that book? Who even remembers that book?” and this falls pretty squarely into that category. I know I read it as a kid because I remembered the cover, but I had zero memory of it. It was for the best. Now I’ve read it as an adult and I have to have the memory of it forever, which may possibly be worse.

First of all, everything about this book is strange. It’s based on an allegedly true story, which is that Regina Leininger, who was a Pennsylvania German girl taken from her family home during an Indian raid and lived in captivity with a tribe for many years, and was returned to her mother after many years and recognized her only after her mother sang “Alone Yet Not Alone Am I,” which was a hymn the family had sung together. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Now, you may think that it’s ripe for drama and entertainment, but this story fails to deliver any of it. But don’t worry, let me tell you all about it in detail.

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A Line in the Sand

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For some reason this is always lumped in with the classics of the Dear America canon, but I have to say that it never really grabbed me for some reason. Maybe the reason is that I’ve never set foot in Texas and don’t understand the folklore of the Alamo, or possibly that I don’t know a whole lot about the Alamo in general (I don’t know why I don’t just start off every blog entry with “I know almost nothing about this,” because it’s pathetic and true).

A Line in the Sand: The Alamo Diary of Lucinda Lawrence, Gonzales, Texas, 1836, Sherry Garland, 1998.

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The story of the Alamo is tied up in the story of Mexico versus Texas versus the United States, which means there’s already a lot of moving parts going on here. Lucinda, our 13-year-old writer, lives in the most distant Texas colony imaginable, so far away that supplies come in only twice a year by wagon. Her family farms cotton—parents, two older brothers and one younger, and Lucinda in the middle. Lucinda goes to school with a few other girls, including her best friend Mittie, but other than that very little happens in their sleepy town until war talk starts sparking up. Their part of Texas belongs to Mexico, but there are far more Americans settled there. Mexico has a more powerful army, but lots of Texans are agitating for their independence, even if it means a mean and bloody war.

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