A review by huncamuncamouse
A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower, 1620 by Kathryn Lasky
3.0
3.5 stars, but I'm rounding down simply because I remember enjoying this as a kid a lot more than I did now. It makes sense to start the Dear America series with a young pilgrim's voyage to the New World. However, the boat ride becomes tedious/repetitive, and it dominates half the novel. There's a lot of clunkiness with the diary format--including how characters are introduced (or not). Some sort of character chart in the frontmatter would have been helpful.
I remembered being horrified by the descriptions of torture (I learned what being hung, drawn, and quartered was from this book), but what I'd forgotten was just how much death dominates this narrative.* There's very little reflection about it; there are glimpses that Remember is skilled at providing comfort to others who are sick and/or dying. Remember has a surprisingly friendly, open attitudes toward the indigenous people she meets. However, it's a fine line between friendliness and exoticism, and this book falls into that a bit. I also seriously doubt that Remember's parents were just letting her go exploring all the time on her own and chatting with Squanto and other adult men (native or otherwise).
The biggest weakness of this book is the lack of character development for Remember's parents. The father is barely even mentioned until the second half, and it just seemed like a curious choice to have so few interactions between Remember and her family. All in all, this was a perfectly fine beginning to the series, but I know better ones are up ahead.
*Dorothy Bradford definitely dies intentionally, right?
Dear parent count: 1. Bonus: tons of people die in the first year of the "settlement."
I remembered being horrified by the descriptions of torture (I learned what being hung, drawn, and quartered was from this book), but what I'd forgotten was just how much death dominates this narrative.* There's very little reflection about it; there are glimpses that Remember is skilled at providing comfort to others who are sick and/or dying. Remember has a surprisingly friendly, open attitudes toward the indigenous people she meets. However, it's a fine line between friendliness and exoticism, and this book falls into that a bit. I also seriously doubt that Remember's parents were just letting her go exploring all the time on her own and chatting with Squanto and other adult men (native or otherwise).
The biggest weakness of this book is the lack of character development for Remember's parents. The father is barely even mentioned until the second half, and it just seemed like a curious choice to have so few interactions between Remember and her family. All in all, this was a perfectly fine beginning to the series, but I know better ones are up ahead.
*Dorothy Bradford definitely dies intentionally, right?
Dear parent count: 1. Bonus: tons of people die in the first year of the "settlement."