(Okay, okay, moving on.) With The Royal Diaries and My Name Is America aimed at slightly older children, our younger siblings were left hungering for something of their own.
And if the Dear America and The Royal Diaries books were all from the perspective of girls, what, by golly, would the boys read? Certainly not girl books. By signing up you agree to our terms of useĪfter you tore through The Royal Diaries, you could read My Name Is America, which gave us stories from young men of America-because, you know, boys can’t have diaries. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. How exciting, to be privy to the private thoughts of young royalty! (And you can believe that naive me thought that, even if these were shelved in fiction, at least some of the passages had to have come from their alleged sources.) Featured royals included Elizabeth I Marie Antoinette and Nzingha of Angola, Africa, among others. The Royal Diaries were perhaps among the most popular, as young monarchs of various countries shared their thoughts.
When Dear America wasn’t enough, there were spin-offs to turn to.
#Royal diarie books series#
Readers who stuck with the series visited all over time in America, including Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1847 ( So Far from Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl ), Mars Bluff, North Carolina, in 1865 ( I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl), Chicago, Illinois, in 1919 ( Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North ) and, in a later publication, San Francisco, California, in 1906 ( A City Tossed and Broken: The Diary of Minnie Bonner ). Death seems to plague every corner of the settlement, Remember is one of only a few children and is consequently rather lonely, marriage is often a thing of survival and convenience, and a new environment has plenty of features to create both anxiety and excitement (as new things often do). Remember’s diary entries can be quite frank and dark-a decent reflection of the colonist’s early years in what would become Massachusetts. Still, if it’s been a while since you’ve flipped through the pages of A Journey to the New World, you might be surprised to revisit it. Eight-year-old me had no concept of this, however, and nostalgia is a powerful drug. It’s also worth noting that referring to the land as “the New World” is also symptomatic of a white-Eurocentric view as that part of the world clearly was not new to its inhabitants. The series might have done better to start with an Indigenous perspective, though the people native to the land we now call America play a reasonably sizable role in Remember’s diary. The first in the series, A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple,Mayflower, 1620 was written by Kathryn Lasky and is a fairly sensible start to a series about American history.
The Dear America series originally held 36 titles but has since expanded and received a relaunch with updated covers in the ‘10s. If you don’t quite recall these books, let me help you out a bit: deckle edged pages, a detailed cover design often with a child’s portrait, a ribbon for marking your place, a diary format, a reference to a historical event or period. It’s been too many years to remember which of the two series I read first-let alone which book from either series-but the impression it left on me has never faded. At the very back of the children’s room in my hometown library is where I first discovered the Dear America and Royal Diaries series.
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