This book is so boring it took me forever to get through it. It’s been on my shelf since I started this blog a year and a half ago and I keep putting it off because I remember it being so dreadfully boring as a kid! I’m becoming more and more convinced that the only reason Ann Rinaldi sold so many books was that there were no other “serious” historical fiction books aimed at this age bracket until Dear America came along, and possibly because these books were required by law to be in the library of every American classroom, just waiting to be assigned to an unwitting kid.

A Break With Charity, Ann Rinaldi, 1992.

If you’re keeping track, this is “the one about the Salem witch trials.” This isn’t going to be a super in-depth recap, because this is 284 pages of dense, dense, dense story. It’s such a shame, because the story of the witch trials itself is such an interesting one, but it’s just been done so much better and in so much more INTERESTING ways (like Lisa Fraustino’s Dear America book)! This reads like a vaguely fictionalized historical book, which it kind of is—the protagonist is a real person, 99% of the characters are real people, the events and timing are all real. But oh god. This is a trial all by itself.

Susanna English, the narrator, is the teenage daughter of a wealthy merchant in Salem, who feels largely left out from the general social run of things. She notices that a group of girls about her age have been gathering at the home of the parson with his slave, Tituba, who is teaching them fortune-telling and “little sorceries.” Because she’s left out of this, she’s jealously (and creepily) hiding in the woods when Tituba’s husband, John Indian, notices and invites her in. Tituba tells Susanna that she’s not doing anything evil, she’s just bringing some love and excitement into their lives because they’re frustrated—caught between girlhood and adulthood and not allowed to do much of anything.

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Does anyone else remember these books? If my cursory Googling is anything to go by, the answer is no. These were a cheap knockoff of the Dear America books, except the main differences were that the DA books were actually in diary format! What on earth is the point of a series called “American Diaries” if the entire book is a regular old book with a 3-page diary entry at the beginning and end? Cop-out! The other difference is that the DA novels dealt with issues with grace and humour and occasionally really excellent writing, while all these books…..do not. Anyway, my childhood library had scads of these books and for some reason I owned one, but I had no idea there were so many of them! There’s nineteen! They’re all by Kathleen Duey, whose work can be described as “workmanlike” at best and downright strange at worst! (She did write the outstandingly bizarre Louisiana Hurricane that I reviewed here.)

Fine, let’s see. This is a rare example of a book I haven’t reread since buying it, since most of my childhood books are splayed open, stained with crumbs, or otherwise bear conspicuous signs of love. This book could be new. It’s a first edition, which means I got it new in 1996 when it came out, and the price on the spine is $3.99. Wow, remember when new paperbacks cost only $4? That was great.

American Diaries: Sarah Anne Hartford, Massachusetts, 1651, Kathleen Duey, 1996.

This book is 142 pages long and contains maybe 6 pages worth of actual plot. Every single thing that happens is streeee-e-e-e-e-etched out with wildly dull descriptions. There’s like a whole chapter devoted to “Sarah cooks dinner.”

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To begin with, I definitely wouldn’t call historical fiction Caroline B. Cooney’s specialty. At all.

The Ransom of Mercy Carter¸Caroline B. Cooney, 2001.

She’s famous for one thing: writing thrillers and mysteries for kids too young to read James Patterson and Stephen King. I think everyone my age inhaled The Face on the Milk Carton and its million interminable sequels, and Emergency Room (which was like a novel about “nice white girl in the wrong neighbourhood” that had done a line of coke and gone way off the rails), and Flight #116 Is Down, which launched a thousand fears of flying. So no one will be surprised to learn that The Ransom of Mercy Carter reads way more like a thriller than an actual historical fiction novel.

Let’s compare to last week’s Standing in the Light. Now, where that was handled with a pretty light hand, Cooney doubles down on the “blood and horror” side of things. There’s a lot of religion, but there’s way, way, way more emphasis on Cooney’s two major wheelhouses: Family and Blood ‘n’ Gore. And I say that in the nicest possible way because I read a shit-ton of her books as a teenager and I have fond memories of my introduction to trash thriller fiction.

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