zenithharpink's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars. This was an interesting perspective from a southern girl during the Civil War. It was extremely short, even as fluffed up for length as it was. Emma seemed like a good and sweet person, but as a supporter of the Confederate cause, a slaveholder, can she really be a good person? I found myself pondering this question throughout the book. Mostly I came to the conclusion that the Civil War was an absolute mess in every possible way. Lives were ruined, on multiple levels, in multiple ways.
Emma's father was even more outspoken (and racist), as were some of her neighbors.
I recommend this book to young readers, as well as to those interested in a different perspective on the Civil War, even though it's largely superficial and fiction. Still a fun read.
Emma's father was even more outspoken (and racist), as were some of her neighbors.
I recommend this book to young readers, as well as to those interested in a different perspective on the Civil War, even though it's largely superficial and fiction. Still a fun read.
diamontique's review against another edition
2.0
The book was rather short, and was quite depressing. The epilogue even more so! Barry Denenburg writes so so strangely, and just because something is depressing doesn't mean it's realistic.
peytonktracy's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Oof. This book had me set up to be skeptical from the minute I picked it up, that it's from the perspective of a young woman in Virginia whose family owns slaves and is fighting for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. I'm not opposed to having problematic history portrayed in fiction, like this, but I feel this one could have been done more carefully than it was. There were occasional letters from Emma's father going on wildly racist rants and rampages about "Northern aggression" which alludes to the idea that the war was about "state's rights" and not explicitly slavery. There was also a lot of what I would consider "mammie" portrayals of enslaved people; very convenient that all of Emma's family's slaves were the loyal dedicated kind who loved their kind, gracious masters. So those elements made me cringe a bit, but I suppose it could have been worse. That being said, I felt like I never knew exactly what was going on historically in this book because, accurate to the moment in history, Emma didn't know what was happening. It was more just repeated death and violence and trauma over and over again and then the book ended. It was a little bizarre in that way - I felt like Emma did grow from a child to a traumatized young adult by the end but I never felt like I saw the growth, just the horrors that forced her to grow up. It was certainly more character focused than others in the series, which I appreciated, but still didn't land right for me. But as the rare book from the Southern perspective in the war, I would say it wasn't a bad read? Go in with a couple tablespoons of salt.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Injury/Injury detail, Slavery, War, Violence, Child death, Grief, Racism, Animal death, and Death of parent
huncamuncamouse's review against another edition
3.0
This is a very difficult book to rate.
A lot of the reviews are about the prevalent racism in this book, and it's there to be sure. One question I see a lot of the adult readers struggling with is how much of this we are supposed to see being the teenage girl narrator's POV and how much of it is the author's ignorance. If adults are this uncertain, that seems a bit troubling given that this is a book written for kids (or um 32-year-old childless crones). I would absolutely NOT recommend this book be given to a child unless it was properly contextualized. And this is one Dear America book where the back matter is not sufficient. There is a great opportunity to pair this one with Clotee's own diary because that book dispels many of Emma's illusions.
So yeah. Emma is incredibly naive about the inner lives of her family's "servants" (no, Emma, your family BOUGHT them). Like a lot of kids, she pretty much parrots back her father's racist, paternalistic views. She's not smart or mature enough to really delve deeper. It seems incredibly unlikely that her mother would take the "risk" of educating their slaves unless she was a low-key abolitionist, but there's no evidence of this in the book. Every time Emma mentions how her father is a "good master" and how "loyal" their slaves are, I rolled my eyes. Here is exactly where secondary readings would be essential for kids. While again, I thought that originally this was just Emma's POV, n the epilogue, the author writes that Iris, the slave who fits a certain racist stereotype and is a mother figure to Emma, not only stays on at the ruined family home but also goes North when adult Emma leaves. It adds nothing to the rest of the book, really, except serving to confuse young readers and actually bolster the myth that there were "happy slaves." (And yes, I can acknowledge that it may have been easier for Iris to move North with someone she knew and a guaranteed job. And I can also hold space for the fact that Iris might have truly cared about Emma).
Okay, with that issue out of the way, there are some other weird things about this book--namely the problem with Cousin Rachel. Am I totally wrong for thinking it's implied that she was seduced, jilted, and then found out she was pregnant? That baby "sister" was totally her own kid, right? At any rate, something happened to her that makes her hate men and scoff at marriage, and her exchanges with Emma are actually pretty amusing. I'd like to see Rachel's diary for sure. Unfortunately, she recedes into the background in the second half of the book, and the epilogue makes it seem like she was a textbook "hysterical" woman (ie: ungovernable and emotional, not crazy).
But what's good about this book is it was a page-turner. I wanted to keep reading and finding out what would happen next. Despite being on the wrong side of history, how can you not feel a pang when the book opens with Emma's brother's death, and slowly, everyone in town loses at least one person to the war. Their food supplies dwindle. Union soldiers ransack their homes, which would have been terrifying for a bevy of reasons. Communications with loved ones at war are few and far between; many only find out a loved one is killed by reading it in the paper. This horror is captured well, and I don't think it's wrong to sympathize with Emma for some of the things that happen to her and her family.
Dead parent count: 1 in the text, 1 in the epilogue. Bonus: 1 brother, 1 cousin, so many acquaintances
A lot of the reviews are about the prevalent racism in this book, and it's there to be sure. One question I see a lot of the adult readers struggling with is how much of this we are supposed to see being the teenage girl narrator's POV and how much of it is the author's ignorance. If adults are this uncertain, that seems a bit troubling given that this is a book written for kids (or um 32-year-old childless crones). I would absolutely NOT recommend this book be given to a child unless it was properly contextualized. And this is one Dear America book where the back matter is not sufficient. There is a great opportunity to pair this one with Clotee's own diary because that book dispels many of Emma's illusions.
So yeah. Emma is incredibly naive about the inner lives of her family's "servants" (no, Emma, your family BOUGHT them). Like a lot of kids, she pretty much parrots back her father's racist, paternalistic views. She's not smart or mature enough to really delve deeper. It seems incredibly unlikely that her mother would take the "risk" of educating their slaves unless she was a low-key abolitionist, but there's no evidence of this in the book. Every time Emma mentions how her father is a "good master" and how "loyal" their slaves are, I rolled my eyes. Here is exactly where secondary readings would be essential for kids. While again, I thought that originally this was just Emma's POV, n the epilogue, the author writes that Iris, the slave who fits a certain racist stereotype and is a mother figure to Emma, not only stays on at the ruined family home but also goes North when adult Emma leaves. It adds nothing to the rest of the book, really, except serving to confuse young readers and actually bolster the myth that there were "happy slaves." (And yes, I can acknowledge that it may have been easier for Iris to move North with someone she knew and a guaranteed job. And I can also hold space for the fact that Iris might have truly cared about Emma).
Okay, with that issue out of the way, there are some other weird things about this book--namely the problem with Cousin Rachel. Am I totally wrong for thinking it's implied that she was seduced, jilted, and then found out she was pregnant? That baby "sister" was totally her own kid, right? At any rate, something happened to her that makes her hate men and scoff at marriage, and her exchanges with Emma are actually pretty amusing. I'd like to see Rachel's diary for sure. Unfortunately, she recedes into the background in the second half of the book, and the epilogue makes it seem like she was a textbook "hysterical" woman (ie: ungovernable and emotional, not crazy).
But what's good about this book is it was a page-turner. I wanted to keep reading and finding out what would happen next. Despite being on the wrong side of history, how can you not feel a pang when the book opens with Emma's brother's death, and slowly, everyone in town loses at least one person to the war. Their food supplies dwindle. Union soldiers ransack their homes, which would have been terrifying for a bevy of reasons. Communications with loved ones at war are few and far between; many only find out a loved one is killed by reading it in the paper. This horror is captured well, and I don't think it's wrong to sympathize with Emma for some of the things that happen to her and her family.
Dead parent count: 1 in the text, 1 in the epilogue. Bonus: 1 brother, 1 cousin, so many acquaintances
musiquedevie's review against another edition
3.0
Well-written but missing something when compared to the amazing storytelling of other 'Dear America' books. The tone was much darker than others, decidedly so because of the nature of the time period it was covering. I appreciated the twist of covering the story from a Southerner's viewpoint but found it hard to truly connect with the characters in the book. The ending seemed abrupt and without the help of the epilogue, would leave the reader at a loss for the characters' future.
sophia_she1's review against another edition
4.0
it's tough to read from the perspective of the confederates especially when opinions about slavery come up but it's otherwise a very good snapshot of a less-talked about part of the civil war
lindsbian's review
slow-paced
I’m honestly lost for words at how bad this book was. Other reviews said most of it, except comparing it to Jr Gone With the Wind is an insult to Gone With the Wind - that book at least led to something good with Hattie McDaniel gaining prominence for her performance in the movie. This book doesn’t even have that.
The characters are all completely unlikable people. I was cautious at the beginning because I hoped there would be character development, since the POV character Emma goes on about how good slave owners her family is. Maybe she would listen to and learn to humanize one of the people her family enslaves? But no, absolutely none. Not even the epilogue indicates she ever grew with the times. And passing this off as historical accuracy is ludicrous - as others have mentioned, Emma’s family apparently teaches the enslaved children to read and write. In Virginia. Which like most Confederate states, made this illegal. Apparently the author never heard of this law or the 1854 memoir “Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a Southern Woman, who was Imprisoned for One Month in the Common Jail of Norfolk, Under the Laws of Virginia, for the Crime of Teaching Free Colored Children to Read” (long title but it really says it all, doesn’t it!) A plot like that of Margaret Crittendon Douglas where they broke the law could have actually made this book interesting. Instead, like other reviewers have said, nothing happens!
If the author really wanted to be historically accurate in depicting a Confederate family, a more sympathetic story could have centered around a more average white slave owning family - or slavery sympathizers who themselves were poor. Instead, Emma’s family has a massive plantation with an unspecified large number of people enslaved (but all treated well! trust the unreliable narrator!) - which bizarrely, the writing refers to as the family’s “servants.” The family are in fact slave owners and Emma mentions slavery so I don’t know why she shies away and calls them servants. It’s very strange and ahistorical.
The writer didn’t have to do any of this. It’s not historically accurate and it’s not a good story even remotely. It’s so strange to read this after rereading “A Picture of Freedom,” an actually amazing Dear America book that both accurately portrays horrors of slavery and also presents MULTIPLE sympathetic characters who are white family members of slave owners. That book did more in its epilogue in a sentence or two with the son of the family who enslaved Clotee than this book does in its entire uneventful plodding excuse of a plot.
I can’t believe this author decided to write this book from the Confederate POV with so little story to tell and such gross racism left unquestioned. It’s probably not impossible to write a good story from the POV of a white slaveowner, but it’s a daunting task for him to have chosen - and failed spectacularly at. For anyone who wants to try to do so now, at least this book can serve as a great How To guide - just avoid basically everything it did! Especially avoid including blatant white supremacist rhetoric left completely unquestioned. Again, use the epilogue or something if you have to, since then the character can have a whole lifetime for character development and social progress that leads to the acceptable views of the time changing.
The characters are all completely unlikable people. I was cautious at the beginning because I hoped there would be character development, since the POV character Emma goes on about how good slave owners her family is. Maybe she would listen to and learn to humanize one of the people her family enslaves? But no, absolutely none. Not even the epilogue indicates she ever grew with the times. And passing this off as historical accuracy is ludicrous - as others have mentioned, Emma’s family apparently teaches the enslaved children to read and write. In Virginia. Which like most Confederate states, made this illegal. Apparently the author never heard of this law or the 1854 memoir “Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a Southern Woman, who was Imprisoned for One Month in the Common Jail of Norfolk, Under the Laws of Virginia, for the Crime of Teaching Free Colored Children to Read” (long title but it really says it all, doesn’t it!) A plot like that of Margaret Crittendon Douglas where they broke the law could have actually made this book interesting. Instead, like other reviewers have said, nothing happens!
If the author really wanted to be historically accurate in depicting a Confederate family, a more sympathetic story could have centered around a more average white slave owning family - or slavery sympathizers who themselves were poor. Instead, Emma’s family has a massive plantation with an unspecified large number of people enslaved (but all treated well! trust the unreliable narrator!) - which bizarrely, the writing refers to as the family’s “servants.” The family are in fact slave owners and Emma mentions slavery so I don’t know why she shies away and calls them servants. It’s very strange and ahistorical.
The writer didn’t have to do any of this. It’s not historically accurate and it’s not a good story even remotely. It’s so strange to read this after rereading “A Picture of Freedom,” an actually amazing Dear America book that both accurately portrays horrors of slavery and also presents MULTIPLE sympathetic characters who are white family members of slave owners. That book did more in its epilogue in a sentence or two with the son of the family who enslaved Clotee than this book does in its entire uneventful plodding excuse of a plot.
I can’t believe this author decided to write this book from the Confederate POV with so little story to tell and such gross racism left unquestioned. It’s probably not impossible to write a good story from the POV of a white slaveowner, but it’s a daunting task for him to have chosen - and failed spectacularly at. For anyone who wants to try to do so now, at least this book can serve as a great How To guide - just avoid basically everything it did! Especially avoid including blatant white supremacist rhetoric left completely unquestioned. Again, use the epilogue or something if you have to, since then the character can have a whole lifetime for character development and social progress that leads to the acceptable views of the time changing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and War
littleseal's review
After reading another Dear America book, this one is pretty boring in comparison. There was definitely a funny moment or two, a number of tragedies, and some interesting historical context but they overall felt lackluster. Especially because as other reviewers said, some of the historical context is inaccurate. Like it's "nice" her slaves were "treated well" but it felt icky reading. Maybe that's the point.
Also, pretty sure Rachel (the cousin) was gay. All her talk of not wanting to get married, being disinterested in boys... I'm telling you, she was a lesbian.
Also, pretty sure Rachel (the cousin) was gay. All her talk of not wanting to get married, being disinterested in boys... I'm telling you, she was a lesbian.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Grief, Medical content, Racism, Slavery, Terminal illness, Violence, War, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Alcohol, Animal death, Child death, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, and Suicide
kittykatrain's review against another edition
3.0
This one didn't excite me like I thought it would. I've only had this happen a few times with these books. Oh well on to the next one