Dear America; My Name is America; The Royal Diaries

[rachelmanija]

These are young adult historical novels written in a diary format, clearly intended to teach history in an entertaining manner. My local library has pretty much all of them. I like being amused by history, I like faux diaries, and I already like some of the authors (Joseph Bruchac, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Laurence Yep, Walter Dean Myers), so I

Comments

[evewithanapple]

I read a lot of the Royal Diaries when I was a kid- I can't remember all of the titles, but I do remember that they were about Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, the Lady of Ch'iao Kuo, Mary Queen of Scots, Kaiulani, Christina of Sweden, Marie Antoinette, Sondok (from modern-day Korea), and Weetamoo (actually about a Native American "princess-" it didn't seem too faily when I read it, but I was only about twelve at the time.) The only one I can definitely warn you away from is Anna Kirwan's other book, "Lady of Palenque-" not faily as I recall (but I only got about a quarter of the way through) but sweet JEEBUS was it dull. Her Victoria one is okay, mostly because the setting invites a sort of dreariness about it, but there is no excuse for writing a boring book about travelling down the Amazon

[laleia]

I used to be obsessed with the Royal Diaries books! I think I learned a lot of history from them -- but then, I enjoyed reading the history notes appendices as much as the stories themselves. I read Lady of Ch'iao Kuo as a kid and remember finding it boring -- but that might also have been because it was a period of China I knew less about and so was less interested in. I also read Nzingha and remember it being interesting but ... these impressions are all a decade old.

[veejane]

My limited experience with the Dear America books is that they are largely drek. I'm a little surprised Myers would agree to write for them.

(They're the series that included one book about a little Indian girl at one of the boarding schools... in something like 1898... not in a nice way. And yet the book ended up not really able to condemn the forced boarding-school experience, as if the editorial board had a mandate for all history to be positive and forward-looking. Which is probably the case.)

On the topic of black cowboys, I do have a (nonfiction, academic) book called Black Cowboys of Texas, with details largely drawn from the Smithsonian recordings of the 20s-30s. And William Loren Katz has done more than one compendium book, for younger readers, about famous black people of the west (more male than female, but not all male and not all cowboys!). The most famous of that ilk is The Black West but I think he's spun it off into a couple of different specific subgenres, like one about Seminoles, one about California, etc. He's

[cicer]

I have almost the whole set of Royal Diaries books, and I really like them. Though, I would definitely warn you away from the Weetamoo, Heart of the Pocassets, Anacaona: Golden Flower, and Lady of Palenque: Flower of Bacal. Cringe-inducing, yes, and also really boring.

My favorites are the ones about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Jahanara of India, Mary of Scots, and Kaiulani of Hawaii. Oh, and the one about Kazunomiya of Japan is also very good.

Really, they're mostly very good, and mostly historically-accurate and culturally-sensitive...except, for some reason, most of the ones about Native American cultures in the western world. :/

I think the Royal Diaries series is a little less hit-and-miss than the general Dear America series. Of course, both series typically do a much better job of portraying American and western European culture than any sort of eastern culture...

[lady_ganesh]

My daughter really enjoys "Dear America," but her quality barometer is iffy.