Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5. Devoted readers of The American Girls Collection will welcome three new stories, each set in winter and centered around changes in the girls' lives. Kirsten (1854), a Swedish immigrant to Minnesota, endures a harsh winter. While her father is away logging, their cabin burns to the ground. Through fortuitous circumstances, the family is able to buy a better home. Samantha (1904), a wealthy New Yorker, has, since the remarriage of her grandmother, lived with her uncle and aunt. Her best friend, a poor girl, has been sent to an orphanage with her two sisters. In a happy-ever-after ending, Samantha's aunt and uncle adopt the the three sisters. Molly (1944) anticipates her father's return from the warfront, hoping to shine for him when she stars in her school's patriotic dance number. Sacrificing health to vanity, she puts her wet hair in curlers, contracts a fever, and welcomes him home from her sickbed. As is customary in this series, full-color illustrations brighten the pages, and a section at the back explains facets of American culture of the period. Each novel is short, each is flawed, yet a more engaging historical fiction series at this reading level has yet to be written. CP.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-6 Three more titles about three girls in different American eras, all dealing with some kind of change in their lives. Kirsten, a ten-year-old Swedish immigrant living with her family on the Minnesota frontier in 1854, must deal with her cabin burning down and moving to a new home. Samantha, a wealthy orphan living with her aunt and uncle in New York City in 1904, spends her five chapters helping her poor friend Nellie, who has been orphaned and sent first to a drunken uncle and then to a Dickensian orphanage replete with evil directress. Molly, a ten-year-old in 1944, is pinning all her hopes on being the tap-dancing Miss Victory in a big show at the veteran's hospital, but things don't work out quite the way she plans. The format of each title is the same. All open with a double-spread of portraits and descriptors introducing the main character's family and friends (although all of characters may not appear in all stories) and close with a ``Looking Back'' section which hits the social history highlights of the United States of that period. The stock types (``Samantha's poor friend,'' ``Kirsten's secret friend, an Indian girl,'' ``Molly's other best friend, a cheerful dreamer'') seem to preclude much peripheral character development, but also make it possible for each story to stand alone, without having read previous episodes. The brief stories tend to focus on events and action, which makes for a quick pace but some occasional lapses in explanation and follow-through. The six-page historical sections focus on changes in America, particularly for women, and are generally a good back-up to the stories' smoothly integrated period details. The selection of historical photos is excellent, although the texts are unavoidably superficial and stick to a middle-class lens in viewing American life. Their generalizations can also fail to provide a context for specific story events. The full-color illustrations, in occasional full-pages and frequent small edge-of-text drawings, capture the feel of the periods and give life to the characters (although the expressions in Kirsten's story are frequently awkward). While these aren't top drawer items (Kirsten, for example, is no Caddie Woodlawn, nor is her story of Sarah, Plain and Tall caliber), they're certainly lively and appealing enough to serve as introductions to historical fiction. Nancy Palmer, The Little School, Bellevue, Wash. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
