Reading this book is like an extremely frustrating exercise where you really, really, really want to like the protagonist but you can’t because she’s written so terribly un­sympathetically you could cry.

Kristina: The Girl King, Sweden, 1638, Carolyn Meyer, 2003.

This is actually the same problem I have with a lot of Carolyn Meyer’s heroines, where they’re so obviously intended to be. Her book on Anastasia is exactly the same way. Maybe I just have very little patience! That’s true, but I’m not sure if it’s relevant here.

Kristina is one of the most fascinating people in European history—raised to be a king, abdicated her throne at only twenty-eight and converted to Catholicism, traveled Europe extensively, and then died and was buried at the Vatican. Her gender identity and sexual identity have been heavily, heavily, heavily discussed in the four centuries or so since her death, and there’s a couple intriguing hints here but nothing major either way. Which is fair, because Kristina is only about thirteen here, but it’s an interesting way to look back at it!

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Fun fact: my library copy of this book is bound upside down and backwards, which is not technically a problem, but makes me very uncomfortable when I’m reading what appears to be an upside-down book backwards.

Kazunomiya: Prisoner of Heaven, Japan, 1858, Kathryn Lasky, 2004.

This is a fairly short one (under 130 pages), but Kathryn Lasky is a good enough writer that it doesn’t feel clipped or shortened. One of her particular gifts is a wonderful eye for sensory details and inclusion of colours and scents, which I think is especially lovely here, but good in all of her books, of course. Additionally, traditional Japanese poetry (where the emphasis is on leaving things unsaid and using short phrases) is a plot point in this book, so the trimmed-down narrative style really works here.

Here’s my standard disclaimer: I know next to nothing about Japanese history, but this book takes place in 1858, just a few years after Japan’s reversal of their isolationist policies in 1853, so it’s of course a time of ongoing political and power struggles. Kazunomiya, or Chikako (her nickname), is the younger half-sister of the Emperor, which means she has been betrothed to be married to the prince Arisugawa ever since they were small children and has been brought up to live at court—learning calligraphy, poetry, music, and history.

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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.

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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What an odd choice for a YA novel. And…interestingly executed, we’ll go with that.

Catherine: The Great Journey, Russia 1743, Kristiana Gregory, 2005.

This is the last installment in the Royal Diaries series (before the halfhearted relaunch), and it’s…different. It’s much shorter than most of the other books, and it’s such an odd choice since Catherine the Great is associated so strongly with licentiousness and autocratic Russian rule. (Even more so than Anastasia, I’d argue, since that story has acquired a lot of romantic cultural twists.) Even though it’s not true that Catherine the Great died in flagrante with a horse, she certainly did have a bunch of lovers and more or less did as she pleased after the death of her husband. And before his death. And while possibly being involved in his death. While I wouldn’t say that her story is inappropriate for younger teens, I would say that her story is infinitely better suited to an adult audience where you can take advantage of all the ready-made drama. Much like the Tudor court.

But since this is a novel about her youth, that doesn’t come into play so much, and what we’re left with instead is a bit on the meek side. A little short, and while it has a lot of interesting points, it feels a little wanting. And similarly there’s very little indication of the very strong personality Catherine had—she was an immensely powerful and intelligent ruler, but the Catherine in this book come off as a bit on the weak side. Part of that is due to her position, but because the epilogue is so short and wimpy it loses a lot of its potential.

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Full disclosure: I know absolutely nothing about Caribbean history in general and Haitian history specifically, but wow. How outstanding was this book???

Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490, Edwige Danticat, 2005.

This is such an interesting novel in a period that is almost never ever ever a focus for any type of fiction in English: pre-Columbian-contact in the non-North American Western Hemisphere. Seriously. Name one other work of fiction for any age range that deals with any part of Central or South America pre-Columbian contact. Totally pre-contact, not “the white people show up at the end.” (Apocalypto doesn’t count.) Why so ignored? It’s so fascinating, and Danticat does such an excellent job of descriptions that it comes alive even for people like me who are (sadly, pathetically) pretty uninformed about Haitian history or indeed Caribbean history in general.

This is one of those interesting books in the series where the diary style is used with a culture that didn’t have a history of written language, so we need to handwave a little bit of that, but once you get past the initial dating system (season, phase of the moon, day, e.g. “The sunny season, first quarter moon, day 1”) it isn’t a distraction any more. Honestly, I think it works really well even discussing cultures that didn’t write, because by allowing the narrative to flow in this way is such a great way of delving into the narrator’s thoughts rather than a recounting of events. Anacaona is sixteen at the outset of the book and about eighteen by the end of it (if I’m counting correctly), and is married with a child by the end as well, so it’s definitely a bit more on the more mature end of things than, say, the Elizabeth I novel. But I would venture a guess to say it’s actually better, and I enjoyed it more afterwards.

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