Romance

In My Father’s House

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Before we get started, let’s look at the cover of this book that perfectly encompasses everything all 90s historical fiction was about: clothes, and wars going on in the distance in soft-focus. And it was a good call by the cover artist to go with 90s hair instead of period-appropriate 1860s hair, because it is one era that has not translated well.

In My Father’s House, Ann Rinaldi, 1993.

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This is a Deep Cut Ann Rinaldi—and I know I’ve complained about her before because the lustre really wore off quickly after I was no longer 12—but this one was better than some of the others I’ve reread. Partially because I, uh, don’t think I read this one as a kid? I didn’t remember a single thing and I feel like I might have, so I think I was reading this one for the very first time. My biggest problem with this book is that it’s boring. The whole thing feels like you’re driving towards some kind of major conclusion, but…there isn’t one. Besides the end of the war, I guess. (Should that be a spoiler? 152 years later?)

This book is one of many Rinaldi books based on a true story, and that’s the story of a man who owned the land that the first battle of the Civil War, First Manassas, was built on. He moved so he would never have to see another soldier again, and ended up moving to Appomattox, where the war was ended in his parlor. That is a true story and it’s one of history’s great coincidences, and would make for an excellent book. This is not that book. This is about Oscie Mason, the stepdaughter of Will McLean, the man in question. Unfortunately, Oscie is not a great character. She’s supposed to come off as plucky and responsible, but in reality she’s just kind of irritating.

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Wait For Me

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I almost never review brand-new books, but I just had to make an exception to recommend this one!

Wait For Me¸ Caroline Leech, 2017.

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It just came out a few months ago so I won’t do a full-fledged recap with spoilers, but I just could not pass this one up. I blew through it in a weekend because I just could not manage to put it down! Partly because it’s like someone wrote a book to spec for me (it’s my favourite subgenre of People Having Romantical Troubles During Wartime (thanks, Fug Girls!)—People On Opposite Sides of Conflict Falling In Love, which is a surprisingly hard genre to find and even harder to find done well—and I don’t want to think about what this says about my psyche, probably nothing good), and partly because it’s just a ripping good tale. It’s a sparkling example of what I feel there isn’t enough of these days—good old YA historical fiction with a side of romance. No magic required, no Gossip Girl-style intrigues, no dystopian steampunk reimaginings of the period, nothing. I love it. God, if only the world would publish more so I can get my fix!

Lorna, our protagonist, lives on her family farm in Scotland, working away and going to school after both her brothers have gone to war (one on the front lines, one in London). She’s scraping by with her father, the housekeeper, and their Land Girl, when her father applies for and receives a German prisoner of war to help work on the farm. Luckily for everyone, Paul speaks some English, and things go about as you can imagine from there. (Spoiler alert: love story.) I love that this book takes place at the end of the war—there have been about a million and eight books written about the outbreak of the war, the Blitz, the evacuations from London, and so on, but not nearly as many about the dragging end.

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Merrie

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I hear you! Believe me, I hear you, and I also think Sunfire is the most hilariously awful crap to grace the pages of “books” in many years. This one promises to be especially bad, since it contains actual, real historical people. Probably depicted poorly, I’ll hazard a guess.

Merrie, Vivian Schurfranz, 1987.

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Before you start, “Merrie” is a variant on Mary. If you’re like me and stood there goggling at it going “What the fuck?” for a few minutes. I already don’t have a good feeling about this book. Also, the cover is atrocious—Merrie has some kind of wild cape going on with an oddly-Victorian-looking merlot gown, while there’s two dudes: one wearing a…scarf around his neck and what appears to be blue jeans with one of those blousy pirate shirts? And the other wearing a Pilgrim getup that looks like it was purchased from Crazy Frank’s Halloween House Of Fun. He’s even clutching a buckled hat. Helpful hint: the Pilgrims wore normal clothing for their day, including all the colours, and didn’t wear buckles on their hats.

And starting this book I already don’t think I’m going to like Merrie. The whole premise of this book is that she’s stowed away on the Mayflower to escape an arranged marriage. Except she’s supposed to come from wealth, which means that she would have been brought up with the idea that marriage would not be strictly a love match, and secondly, why the Mayflower of all the godforsaken ships in England? Surely you could find a ship going somewhere warm and not a completely isolated place in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, Merrie is discovered on page six and we’re ready to rock and roll.

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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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Cannons at Dawn

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I would wager a good bet that few of you guys who enjoyed The Winter of the Red Snow as a kid even knew that this book existed. Trust me, you were better off that way.

Cannons at Dawn: The Second Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1779, Kristiana Gregory, 2011.

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Now, before I start complaining, I’ll note two things: one, that this was an experiment as the first “sequel” diary in the Dear America series (and the last); and secondly, that Gregory’s longtime editor passed away before this book was written, and I wonder if the change in editing tone made a major difference to the book. It’s not bad, but it’s not what I would have hoped for.

Now to the complaints: this book is one of those that wants to zip through a ton of time super fast and consequently sacrifices good plot. So instead of having a short period of time and a story that moves along well, we have half a book of good story and half a book that’s just basically recounting facts and skipping months and months at a time. Which is OK, but not particularly what I look for in a Dear America book! The Winter of the Red Snow has charm and cheek. Cannons at Dawn is a slog.

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Carrie

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Do you remember the first and third books I recapped in this series last year? They were pretty bad. (You could have probably figured that out.) The second one is oddly hard to lay my hands on, although I remember enjoying it more than the others when I read it. Maybe other people thought the same thing, which is why it’s hard to find now? No, we should be so lucky.

Carrie: Heart of Courage, Cameron Dokey, 1998.

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This is a book about the Chicago fire of 1871, which confused me a lot when I looked at the book for the first time because the hat Carrie is wearing on the cover is supposed to be a fancy summer hat, but looks more like a cowboy hat from a strange angle. Doesn’t it? Yes, it’s being held onto her head with a pink sash and she’s wearing a party dress, but I can’t be responsible for my initial impressions of the cover.

The whole first bit of this book is mostly Carrie whining about how she’s a shy, terrified little flower and her whole family is full of “strong Kelly women”—her great-grandmother participated in the Boston Tea Party, her grandmother was kidnapped and almost was caught in the burning of Washington in 1812, her mother traveled halfway across the world, and her older sister is an ardent suffragette. It’s not pointed out until much later in this book that excepting her sister, none of those women were Kellys by birth, so it should probably be just “strong women.” Anyway, Carrie’s trying to break out of her shell by going to a suffragette rally with her annoying friend Jessica, who’s telling her the whole time that she’s afraid of everything and paranoid. You know, given everything that happens to Carrie in this book, she is kind of right to be worried about stuff.

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Cassie

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The last few books have been pretty good so I figured we’d go back down to earth with a horrible book that made me want to gouge out my own eyes.

Cassie¸ Vivian Schurfranz, 1985.

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It’s not a Sunfire book if I’m not screaming incoherently at some point, right? Look at the cover and tell me if that’s not some appallingly racist trash right there. This literally looks like a white girl dressed up in a poorly-made “Indian” Halloween costume. Literally the most blonde, blue-eyed, cheerleader-type model they could find! And her two love interests look suspiciously similar. Everything about this book is already making me upset.

To begin with, the entire premise of this book is crap. “Blonde Cassie Stevens” (which, I’m not kidding, is how she’s introduced on the back cover) was captured by the Iroquois at the age of four and adopted into their tribe. But despite living with them for more than ten years and fully adapting to their ways and language, she’s totally ready to abandon them all for the first white guy to come along. She meets him on page THREE. She’s just chilling having a bath in the river when this fur trapper comes along and drags her out of the water, and she’s just so taken by him that she can’t stop herself from chatting. Also never fully explained: she was taken at the age of four, and perfectly fluent in Iroquois, but apparently has no problem speaking freely and colloquially with this white guy, Joshua. They sort of hand-wave it away by explaining that Cassie was used to chatting with the tribe’s interpreter in English. But…if you stop learning English at age four, aside from occasional conversations, how good is it really going to be? And she has absolutely zero problems.

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Margaret

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I wanted to hate this book so badly but I just couldn’t. Who knows, maybe I just had a particularly good week, but as stupid and ridiculous as this book was (and trust me: it was) I couldn’t hate it as much as I hate most of the Sunfire books. (I.e., enjoyable hatred.)

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Margaret, Jane Claypool Miner, 1988.

This book came out the year I was born and has a sticker on the back that says “PRICE 25¢” and I have no idea when it dates from. But at one point this book also passed through the Book Rack (locations in Arlington and Richland Hills, Texas) and cost $1.25 there. Check out this cover—Margaret is a spoiled, naïve little girl, but it’s impossible to hate anyone who wears a hat so jauntily with an expression of such clueless self-satisfaction. Also, her outfit bears a suspicious resemblance to the American Girl, Addy’s school outfit (and as I Googled this I discovered they changed it and now it’s not as cute anymore! WTF, this is what happens when Mattel just fucked up everything), just look at it!

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Anyway, look at the other men on the cover: there’s a hayseed wearing a suspiciously sharp-looking blue shirt and jeans and suspenders; and a nattily-dressed youth in a striped tie and straw boater, and he and Margaret are embracing in the bottom corner and gazing into each other’s eyes. Now normally this is a giant honking clue as to who the main character will end up with, but I suspect not in this case because usually the richer the guy is, the more of a douchebag he is. Let’s see.

Margaret here is the wealthy orphaned daughter of a Chicago family, who’s grown up with her aunt and uncle in the lap of luxury. But she’s decided (and it is never fully explained why) that she wants to dump all of that and become a schoolteacher in Nebraska. Also not fully explained: how she found out about this town, how they came to offer her a teaching position, any of this. Whatever, it’s not really important, clearly, because by page 13 Margaret is off on a train to Nebraska. Ridiculously, apparently she spends only “eight hours” on the train between Chicago and Nebraska, which is blatantly stupid because it takes longer than that right now in 2016 to go between Chicago and Omaha. In 1886 that would definitely not be an eight-hour trip. I’m so confused.

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Audacious: Ivy’s Story

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It’s okay, after this book there’s only one left in the series and we can put these tragic books away. But rest assured: out of all of them, this one is by far the one that made me go “WTF?” the most. By a long shot. And that is saying something, considering all the others have not exactly been classics of English literature.

Audacious: Ivy’s Story, Jude Watson, 1996.

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The “plot” of this one (if plot isn’t too strong a word—we might alternately go with “vaguely thought-out premise” for the same idea) is that Ivy Nesbitt, the sister of Mattie Nesbitt (in the last terrible one of this series I reviewed), is a sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad and lonely, oh so lonely, broken spinster-woman. At the old, old, old, extremely elderly age of eighteen. It’s OK if you just threw up your hands and made a face at the computer. That’s the face I made at the book the whole time I was reading it.

Ivy and her sister are from Maine, where after the death of their parents they made a stab at keeping the family farm, but it eventually failed. They had no money and only a maiden aunt left, so they headed off to become miners’ brides after seeing the “Brides Wanted” ad. Ivy spent the whole time weeping and wailing and sobbing because of her broken heart, though. She had been in love with a boy, Jamie, her whole childhood, and everyone thought they were going to get married one day until they went for a sail, got lost in the fog, and had to spend the night on an island alone with no chaperone. Jamie then decided he wanted to be a sailor and left just after that, which meant everyone in their town was convinced that he’d Had His Way With Her and then fucked off. In fairness, that’s a pretty reasonable assumption.

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Jessica

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This book, like all Sunfire books, is more or less bizarre, but one of the most bizarre things is that on the back cover, the Indian guy is wearing blue jeans. And on the front cover, he’s the whitest-looking Indian guy I’ve ever seen, he looks like Scott Baio, complete with a 1980s shag cut and a ponytail. Not sure if that’s better or worse than Jessica’s poufy ponytail.

Jessica, Mary Francis Shura, 1984.

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Like all the books, Jessica has two men fighting over her love, but since one of them is an Indian guy you know automatically he’s not going to win. This book was published in 1984, you just know he isn’t going anywhere. Unfortunately, she hooks up with an asshole, but that seems to be the way of all these books, so hey, whatever.

Jessica lives in Kansas just after the Civil War, with her father, stepmother, and two younger brothers. She’s being courted sort of half-heartedly by a guy named Roy Blanding, who is really bland. (Never say these books lack subtlety.) She’s complaining about how her parents don’t treat her like an adult while she heads over to the new neighbours, Will Reynolds and his pregnant wife, to bring them a basket as they’ve just moved in. They’re from Chicago, and are extremely rude to Jessica, and Will tells her to fuck off because they don’t need her running around telling them what to do, and get the fuck out because he knows everything, blah blah blah. He has known her for ONE MINUTE. And claims that they don’t need charity. How rude.

Later that week Jessica is wandering through town reflecting on how Indians don’t kill more than they can eat, as you do when looking in shop windows, and I would like to introduce her to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump and yes they did because they were just people, not saints. But this is the 80s, and the Magical Indian trope is in full effect, and this is foreshadowing because: never let it be said that these books are not SUPER SUPER SUBTLE. CAN YOU HEAR HOW SUBTLE THEY ARE?????

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