Literature / Dear America

Dear America is a middle grade series of Historical Fiction novels published by Scholastic. The books are written to resemble diaries by the young girl protagonists that are keeping as they go through their life events during various events in American History, ranging from as early as the voyage of the Mayflower to as "recent" as The Vietnam War. Books are written so as to appear real, complete with a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue and the author and book data not printed on the front covers (and instead cited on the back pages).The series was first launched in 1996 and originally ended in 2004 after its thirty-sixth book. It was then relaunched in September 2010 with a new book and re-releases of three older books, with three new titles (one being a sequel) released along.

It inspired three spin-off series in the US:

• My Name Is America: Dear America's Spear Counterpart, starring male protagonists.
• My America: A series of trilogies focusing on younger characters.
• The Royal Diaries: Fictional diaries of various historical royal women as girls.

There were also local history versions produced by several of Scholastic's international branches such as Dear Canada, My Story (UK), and My Australian Story. Three US books in the series were published as part of the My Story series in the UK: A Journey to the New World (as Mayflower), A Picture of Freedom (as Slave Girl), and Voyage on the Great Titanic. There was also an HBO miniseries that selected certain books as episodes.

List of Titles

The books, in order by chronological era are:

• A Journey To The New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple (Mayflower/New World, 1620)
• I Walk in Dread: The Diary of Deliverance Trembley, Witness to the Salem Witch Trials (Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1691)
• Standing In The Light: The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan (Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1763)
• Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, a French Slave Girl (New York Colony, 1763)
• Love Thy Neighbor: The Tory Diary of Prudence Emerson (Greenmarsh, Massachusetts, 1774)
• The Winter Of Red Snow: The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1777)
• Cannons At Dawn: The Second Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1779)
• A Line In The Sand: The Alamo Diary of Lucinda Lawrence (Gonzalez, Texas, 1836)
• Valley of the Moon: The Diary of Maria Rosalia de Milagros (Sonoma Valley, Alta California, 1846)
• Across The Wide And Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell (1847)
• So Far from Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl (Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847)
• All the Stars in the Sky: The Santa Fe Trail Diary of Florrie Mack Ryder (The Santa Fe Trail, 1848)
• Seeds Of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild (California Territory, 1849)
• A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl (Belmont Plantation, Virginia, 1859)
• A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin (Fenwick Island, Deleware, 1861)
• The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl (New Mexico, 1863)
• When Will This Cruel War Be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson (Gordonsville, Virginia, 1864)
• I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl (Mars Bluff, South Carolina, 1865)
• The Great Railroad Race: The Diary of Libby West (Utah Territory, 1868)
• Down the Rabbit Hole: The Diary of Pringle Rose (Chicago, Illinois, 1871)
• Land of the Buffalo Bones: The Diary of Mary Ann Elizabeth Rodgers, an English Girl in Minnesota (New Yeovil, Minnesota, 1873)
• Behind The Masks: The Diary of Angeline Reddy (Bodie, California, 1880)
• My Heart is on the Ground: the Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl (Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 1880)
• My Face to the Wind: The Diary of Sarah Jane Price, a Prairie Teacher (Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1881)
• West to a Land of Plenty: The Diary of Teresa Angelino Viscardi (New York to Idaho Territory, 1883)
• A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska (Lattimer, Pennsylvania, 1896)
• Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl (New York City, 1903)
• A City Tossed and Broken: The Diary of Minnie Bonner (San Francisco, California, 1906)
• Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker (New York City, 1909)
• Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady (RMS Titanic, 1912)
• A Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen (Washington DC, 1917)
• When Christmas Comes Again: The World War I Diary of Simone Spencer (New York City to the Western Front, 1917)
• Like the Willow Tree: The Diary of Lydia Amelia Pierce (Portland, Maine, 1918)
• Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North (Chicago, Illinois, 1919)
• Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1932)
• Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Diary of Bess Brennan (The Perkins School For the Blind, 1932)
• Survival in the Storm: The Dust Bowl Diary of Grace Edwards (Dalhart, Texas, 1935)
• One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss (Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938)
• Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows (Hawaii, 1941)
• The Fences Between Us: The Diary of Piper Davis (Seattle, Washington, 1941)
• My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck (Long Island, New York, 1941)
• With the Might of Angels: The Diary of Dawnie Rae Johnson (Hadley, Virginia, 1954)
• Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Diary of Molly Mac Kenzie Flaherty (Boston, Massachusetts, 1968)

Compare to American Girl, another series of historical fiction books starring younger protagonists; and Girlhood Journeys, a short-lived series of historical characters around the world.

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The series provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Though not common in the early books, some later protagonists have these or abusive guardians.
  • Deliverance Trembley's uncle is of the neglectful variety, as he completely abandons her and her sister to fend for themselves (something that's near-impossible for girls in that time), just disappearing without a word.
  • Pringle Rose's aunt and uncle, who move in after her parents' deaths, are emotionally abusive to Pringle and her brother Gideon (who is developmentally disabled). When Pringle catches them physically abusing Gideon as well, she decides enough is enough and runs away with him.
  • In Land Of the Buffalo Bones, Polly's best friend Jane is violently abused by her father, so much so that even Polly's father, upon learning of the abuse, sides with Jane, giving her a Christian marriage to her Native American husband ^note they had been married by his customs, but the English would not recognize that as a valid marriage so that he can be justified in not returning Jane to her father.
• Academic Athlete:
  • The protagonist of With The Might of Angels, Dawnie, has the highest grades in the elementary division of her school but more than anything wants to be part of the All-American Girls Baseball League. (The epilogue reveals she eventually changes her mind and becomes a doctor.)
  • Max, Julie Weiss's brother from One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping, skipped a grade, reads Rilke, attended Vienna University, takes fencing lessons, and plays on a Zionist soccer team.
  • Kat from A Time For Courage is a hockey player that struggles with math and Latin, but really starts improving throughout the story and uses her Latin and readings to make comparisons to gladiator fights and the Suffrage movement.
• Adoption Conflict: In I Thought My Soul Would Rise And Fly, freed slave Nancy (Patsy's fellow house servant) has spent most of her life as the personal servant of Mrs. Davis. When Mary Ella, Nancy's mother, is freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, she makes her way to the Davis plantation to get her daughter. Mrs. Davis (more out of her own self-interests than love for Nancy) refuses to release her, while Nancy (who's been gaslighted into being loyal to the Davises) refuses to go. The issue is taken to court where the magistrate rules in favor of the Davises, stating that, even with the Proclamation freeing the slaves, Nancy is a "bound servant" until she turns eighteen. Nancy is initially happy about this until Patsy calls her an idiot to her face.
• Affectionate Nickname: Some of the girls have these:
  • Zipporah Feldman (Zippy)
  • Lucinda Lawrence (Cinda)
  • Remember Whipple (Mem). Mem calls her friend Humility Sawyer "Hummy."
  • Katherine Bowen (Kat)
  • Zipporah Feldman's mom has Yiddish "baby names" for all three of her girls. Tovah is Tovala, Miriam is Mirmela, and Zipporah is Zippola. Zipporah's dad also calls her his "little potato angel" because he used to call her "little doll," until she said she'd rather be called a potato.
• All for Nothing: The epilogue of So Far From Home makes the entire story this with the revelation that Mary died of cholera at the age of 17. Mary went to America hoping to find a better life for herself and to eventually bring her parents to America too, but the latter goal is brutally thwarted as she receives news of her parents' deaths partway through the story, and then it turns out she never got to fully experience the better life she wanted either. In the end, all she got for her trouble and hard work was a few years of slightly less misery than she would have had by staying in Ireland.
• All-Natural Fire Extinguisher: A close variant in The Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty: United States Marine Corps. At a couple of points a neighboring platoon comes under heavy attack by the Vietcong, and Patrick's unit provides support fire. In both cases the fight goes on so long that their machine guns are at risk of overheating, but their commanders order them not to use their drinking water to cool the guns (because in the heat, the risk of dehydration is too high), so the Marines resort to urinating on the guns to cool them off.
• All of the Other Reindeer: In With the Might of Angels, Dawnie and Gertie and both of their siblings have to deal with bigoted bullies.
• Alpha Bitch:
  • The Star Points in My Secret War. They're made up of vapid girls who only care about being pretty and stylish. They get better as the book goes on.
  • Sadie McCall in Survival in the Storm seems to punish Helen and Grace for existing. Especially Helen, at least until the third act.
  • Missy in A Picture of Freedom is as close to this as a slave girl on an 1860s plantation can get, being increasingly domineering and cruel towards Clotee and Spicy as the book goes on and becoming the "pet" slave to Miz Lilly.
• Annoying Younger Sibling:
  • Green from A Line in the Sand spends half of his time mouthing off. Other examples include Teresa's sister Netta from West to a Land of Plenty until she dies, Grace's sister Ruth from Survival in the Storm until her friend’s death, Libby's brother Joe from The Great Railroad Race, and Polly's half sister Laura in Land of the Buffalo Bones.
  • Chances are, if the main character has a younger sibling older than an infant, they are going to be this. (If she has multiple younger siblings, it may not be all of them, but there will be at least one.) Chances are also that something is going to happen to make her realize her sibling is more important than she wanted to admit. Teresa loses Netta, Grace and Ruth spend several days trapped in an abandoned house and then Grace has to watch Ruth handle the death of her best friend, and Laura, having ruined Polly's painting paper, makes a Christmas wish for Polly to get more paper rather than wishing for something for herself.
  • There are also some protagonists who are seen as this by their own older siblings. Molly from Where Have all the Flowers Gone is said to have been an annoyance to her brother Patrick (confirmed in his own words in his My Name is America counterpart story), if more because he felt that her intelligence made him look stupid than because of any actual act she took. Deliverance from I Walk In Dread also frequently irritates her older sister Remembrance (the feeling is usually mutual). And Nellie Lee of Color Me Dark also has moments of this towards older sister Erma Jean, though they're normally close.
• Anti-School Uniforms Plot: There's an incident in Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, set in 1968 Boston, where protagonist Molly Flaherty is suspended for involvement in a protest against the school uniform policy.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Molly Flaherty gives her uncle one in Where Have all the Flowers Gone. Upon hearing him make remarks against blacks at a New Year's Eve party, she asks (alluding to his career as a fireman) what color the two little kids he recently saved from a burning apartment were. He replies they were black, so Molly asks, "If you had known that before, would you have gone in there?"
• Arranged Marriage: In A Coal Miner's Bride, Anetka's hand in marriage was promised by her father to an acquaintance (who needed a mother for his children) in exchange for tickets to bring her and her younger brother to America from Poland. On the boat, Anetka befriends Lidia, who was disowned by her parents because they had arranged a marriage for her, but she decided to defy them and marry her sweetheart instead. (See Parental Marriage Veto)
• Artistic License – History:
  • My Heart is on the Ground is about Nannie Little Rose, a Lakota Indian girl who is sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution (run like a prison) meant to force Native children to become "white". Firstly, Nannie probably would not have been given a diary in the first place, which discounts the whole book. But, let's say she was. She would not refer to herself as "Sioux" and instead would use her area or band. Rinaldi also gets many Lakota customs wrong, mainly by using American descriptions of them rather than finding out what actually happened. She even makes up the more "Indian" sounding words for Lakota words that already exist, such as "night-middle-made" and "friend-to-go-between-us", in addition to giving Carlisle and its staff a major Historical Villain Downgrade. Needless to say, actual Lakota were less than pleased and found multiple faults with the book, and this book was left out in the rereleased series.
  • Likewise with The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl. The book is framed as being dictated from Sarah Nita—who lived through the Long Walk of the Navajo—to her granddaughter, who is writing the story down to make a record of it. However, a child hearing any story would sit and listen respectfully rather than make notes or dictation—and given the topic, would not be made to listen to the story alone with no one else around to support her—and many Elders didn't speak on the tragedy at all because of the severe trauma it gave them. Sarah wouldn't have called herself "Navajo" and instead used "Dinè". The American soldiers are overall made to appear kind and only doing their jobs (with only a few mentions of some "mean" ones who "abuse women" and some passing mentions of people being shot), and the reason for the move is cited as the Natives doing so much raiding that they had to be moved away (essentially having Sarah repeat and affirm the justifications that the Americans more or less made up to justify their actions). Finally, Sarah is renamed "The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow" because she spends their death march trying to keep spirits up and cheerful with stories she makes up on the spot. Like My Heart Is On The Ground, this book was left out in the rerelease.
  • Another example occurs in When Will This Cruel War Be Over, which is a telling of the end of the Civil War from the point of view of the daughter of a slaveholding family in Virginia. A slaveholding family that happens to teach their slaves how to read. This would actually have been illegal in Virginia and most of the Confederacy, but the book doesn't really note that anywhere.
• Beauty Is Bad: Missy in A Picture of Freedom is mentioned to be beautiful, and Clotee mentions at one point that she'd like to be pretty like her. She's also a spiteful bully to Clotee and a suck-up to the domineering Lilly Henley.
• Best Friends-in-Law: The epilogue of Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie reveals that Hattie and her best friend on the wagon trail, Pepper, became sisters-in-law when Hattie married Pepper's brother, Wade.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • The protagonist of Hear My Sorrow witnesses the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which dozens of workers trapped on the blazing factory floor, including Angela's cousin Rosa, jump to their deaths rather than face the more painful death that awaits them in the fire. (This is very much Truth in Television: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a real event, and the book's depiction is remarkably accurate.)
  • Dreams of the Golden Country features a similar, though entirely fictional, event based on the real-life Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: In Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie, Mrs. Kenker pretends to be a gentle old lady while being a selfish, opportunistic thief who regularly steals other people's belongings behind their backs. She becomes sympathetic when Hattie finds out from Mrs. Kenker's former neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Bigg, that her two sons were killed in a house fire that destroyed everything she and her husband owned before they joined the wagon train, and her husband later falls to his death when he goes off of a cliff to try to swim in the river far below. In the end in Oregon, Hattie makes peace with her.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some of the books end with this type of ending, with some of the heroine's friends and family dead or missing. The epilogues also count as well.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Sumps in A City Tossed And Broken. Mr. Sump is involved in illegal activity. Mrs. Sump is selfish, racist, verbally and emotionally abusive to their daughter and only cares about her social status. While Lily (unlike her parents) seems to have a good heart, she is depressed, emotionally repressed, and naive to the point where she becomes the target of a con artist, who pretended to fall in love with her in order to extort money from her father. At least she dies before she learns the truth.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Downplayed in My Heart Is on the Ground; the school Nannie attends has its awful aspects, mainly in the way that they try to force the children to assimilate (cutting off their hair or punishing them for not speaking English), but for the most part it's not outright abusive or truly horrific, and most of the adults are decent and even kind. This portrayal has earned the book a fair bit of criticism, since the real Carlisle school was brutal even by the standards of this trope.
• Bookends:
  • Early Sunday Morning begins and ends with Amber's father announcing to the family that they will be moving. The first time, Amber notes that she could tell her mother didn't know in advance; the second time, she looks at her mother and can tell that this time she knew.
  • The first and last entries in When Will This Cruel War Be Over? both deal with the death of a loved one. In the first entry, it's Emma's older brother Cole, killed in The Civil War. in the last entry, it's her infant cousin Elizabeth, dying of illness. the latter causes her to fully become a Broken Bird.
• Boomerang Bigot: Julie's Uncle Daniel in One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping counts as he's a Jew that's ashamed of his heritage and converted to Christianity; he thinks Hitler's only after Polish Jews and looks down at them.
• Break the Haughty: This happens to former Alpha Bitch Sadie McCall from Survival in the Storm. Her family loses most of their money to the Dalhart Bank, and they move to California in hopes of buying a fruit or vegetable farm with their cash savings. But once they're in California, her father abandons her, her mother, and her sisters at a roadside cafe. They end up in the same migrant camp as Helen Walker, her old enemy. Things don't get much better: they frequently don't even have enough to eat, Sadie has to drop out of school to work, she and her mother are harassed by the farm owners because they're clearly new to working for a living, and her hair has to be shaved off because she gets lice. But she and Helen make up, and later gains Grace’s forgiveness.
• Buried Alive: A Coal Miner's Bride has several instances of men being killed in mine shaft collapses. Including Anetka's husband Stanley.
• But Not Too White: Hince of A Picture of Freedom is described as light-skinned, having "grayish-lookin' cat eyes" and "curly, sandy hair", and Spicy uses it to insult him when he teases her for her name by calling him a "half-white dog" (which greatly hurts him). Clotee ponders on this because Hince's father is unknown and rumored to be a white man, and could possibly be their own plantation master Henley. They later take advantage of it, by forging papers saying Spicy, dressed in mens' clothing, has been sold to "Hince Henley," and running away by passing as a white man and his slave.
• Cassandra Truth: Hattie in Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie tries to tell her aunt and mom that Mrs. Kenker, the outwardly sweet old lady in their wagon train, is a thief. But out of stress and deference, they don't listen.
• Chafing Against the Dress Code: In one incident in Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Molly Flaherty leads a protest rally at her Catholic school against the dress code, during which the group defies it by wearing normal shirts and pants. It doesn't go as planned: they're all suspended and her parents blow up at her.
• Character Development: In With The Might Of Angels, Dawnie’s parents start standing up for themselves against the white community members after Dawnie integrates Prettyman School, her father in particular.
• Chekhov's Gun: In A Picture Of Freedom, when the plantation's new overseer starts making moves on Spicy, Clotee saves Spicy from him by claiming that Mr. Harms has already picked Spicy for himself. At the book's climax, Spicy claims that she and Mr. Harms had been together during his time there (as a supposed reason why her boyfriend would falsely accuse Mr. Harms of being an abolitionist), and the overseer unwittingly ends up helping them by mentioning that he had in fact been told of the existence of that relationship.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The narrator of Seeds of Hope talks about going to live in Oregon City with their aunt Augusta, uncle Charles and cousins Hattie, Bennie, and Jake Campbell who had traveled out to Oregon by wagon from Missouri. This is the family of the narrator from Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie. Both books were written by Kristiana Gregory.
  • The narrator of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is in the play When Will This Cruel War Be Over?. Author Barry Denenberg clearly based it on another of his Dear America books.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: In I Walk in Dread, narrator Liv Trembley points out that this is happening during the Salem witch trials.
• Cool Teacher: A lot of the girls have these; in many cases they are the ones who give the protagonists their diaries. They include:
  • Teresa Viscardi's Mrs. Curran.
  • Bess Brennan's Ms. Salinger (who offers to write the diary entries for her while she is learning Braille, because Bess is blind).
  • Margaret Ann Brady's teacher Sister Catherine from the orphanage where she spent a few years after the death of her parents.
  • Nannie Little Rose of My Heart is on the Ground has one at her Boarding School of Horrors in head teacher Mrs. Campbell, who is compassionate toward her students and does not look down on their heritage — at least, not as actively as the other teachers. Sewing teacher Mrs. Monk arguably becomes this, especially after the death of Little Rose's best friend Pretty Eagle.
  • Julie Weiss in One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping has Mrs. Thompson, who meets with Julie to offer help when her grades drop and later announces that her classroom is no place for antisemitism (contrasted with Julie's friend's Sadist Teacher Mr. Erickson who devotes class time to talking about Aryans being superior), and English tutor Miss Sachs, who plays American music as part of lessons.
  • Sister Jennie in Like The Willow Tree. She’s patient with the stubborn and grieving Lydia and gives her good advice and helps her adjust to life in The Shakers.
• Cool Uncle: Several girls have these, and/or a Cool Aunt who is usually younger and more "with it" than the parents. They include:
  • All three of Nellie Lee and Erma Jean Love's uncles, Pace, Mitchell (Meece) and John Willis. Pace was Erma Jean's favorite until he was tragically killed. Meece is cool by virtue of his job—he owns a Chicago club. John Willis is developmentally disabled but still cool because he plays with his nieces and is able to listen to their problems and respond compassionately. The girls also have a cool Aunt Beth Annie (Thanne) who is an extroverted flapper—a big deal for a conservative family from Tennessee.
  • Zipporah Feldman has her Uncle Schmully, who helps her pursue her dreams of acting.
  • Hattie Campbell has Aunt June, who is her confidante during the trip across the Oregon Trail.
  • Clotee has her Aunt Tee and Uncle Heb, who work as the plantation's cook and gardener respectively and raised her after her mother's death.
  • Amber Billows's friend Kame, has Miss Kozuke, her maternal aunt, who is very positive and modern, compared to her melancholy, traditional, and Japanese-speaking mother.
  • Uncle Martin in One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping counts as an example that's Promoted to Parent. He makes his niece comfortable and tries to cheer her up and teaches her what a "proper cheesecake" looks like and never to have business lunches. Her Aunt Clara counts as a female example due to her introducing Julie into acting and teaching her everything there is to know.
  • In one aversion, Molly Flaherty has her Uncle Jim, who is a little too attached to his booze and makes racist remarks.
  • Averted in Like The Willow Tree with Lydia’s Aunt Sarah, who complains about everything and shows no sympathy to Lydia and Daniel about the deaths of their parents and baby sister.
• Chosen Conception Partner: In A Picture of Freedom, Clotee's friend Wook is forced to marry Lee, a man nearly twice her age from another plantation, because Master Henley ordered it out of the belief they'd make strong children. She's miserable about being married to a stranger she doesn't love, especially when he later tells her he wants to marry someone else, and ultimately runs away because of it. Henley also did this in the past for Clotee's Aunt Tee and Uncle Heb, who grew to genuinely love each other afterwards in contrast.
• Country Mouse: Willie Faye in Christmas After All, who comes from a backwater town in Texas and, upon arrival at the Swifts' house, thinks the window must be plugged up to block dust storms, has never seen modern plumbing or a bathroom before, and is unaware of most pop culture things.
• Daddy's Girl: In One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, Julie practically hero-worships her father, while her relationship with her mother is strained.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to many children's historical fiction (including the American Girl books), with its willingness to show many forms of death, violence, racism and bigotry. Within the series itself A Coal Miner’s Bride, One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, So Far From Home and When Will This Cruel War Be Over? are considered the darkest in the series.
• Dead Guy Junior: The epilogues of many books reveal that the narrator named some or all of her children after dead relatives or friends. For example, in Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie, one of the twins born near the end of the journey to Oregon is named after Mrs. Bigg, who drowned a few days earlier during a river crossing.
• Death by Childbirth:
  • The fate of Julie's Cousin Eva in One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping.
  • This happens to Abby's mother’s cousin Deborah in Cannons At Dawn. The baby died with her.
• Death of a Child: Often, and it's tragic.
  • One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping features a baby dying in his mother's suicide (she took him with her) and a little boy trying to keep his father from being taken by the Nazis.
  • A Journey to the New World features a few children dying from illnesses like this one little girl who saw her dead Mother right when she died and a friend of Mem Whipple.
  • Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie features three children, a young girl and two boys, dying from sampling hemlock mistaken for root vegetables, along with a few wagons getting lost in the river. Hattie's four sisters – three adolescent, one under twelve – also died before the book begins.
  • When Will This Cruel War Be Over? has Emma's baby cousin dying from an illness at the end.
  • A Picture of Freedom mentioned that Wook, Clotee's best friend, drowned along with her parents and her infant brother when their boat overturned during an attempt to escape. When Clotee learns that the owners sometimes lie about slaves dying while escaping to discourage other escapes, she hopes Wook and her family are one such case. Mr. Harms tells her no, their deaths were sadly real.
  • A Line in the Sand mentioned that Lucinda's baby sister died on their way to Texas, her cousin died in an epidemic, and her friend Mittie's little sister died.
  • Survival in the Storm has Ruth's best friend Hannah Mayfield die of dust pneumonia.
  • The Stewarts in The Winter Of Red Snow have lost five sons in infancy. So there’s a lot of fear surrounding Johnny, their sixth son.
  • The death of Teresa's sister, Netta, in West to a Land of Plenty. She's ill from a known epidemic, but doesn't tell anyone.
  • When there’s news of a factory fire in Dreams in the Golden Country, Zipporah's mother panics, thinking it’s her older daughter Tovah's workplace. Luckily, it isn’t. But it's Mamie’s, and she doesn’t make it out alive. Zipporah's newborn baby brother also dies just a few days after his premature birth, and a neighbor's young son dies too.
  • In My Heart is On the Ground, Nannie's best friend Lucy Pretty Eagle apparently dies of natural causes, but it's implied that she was really in a deep self-induced trance, mistakenly presumed dead, and Buried Alive.^note  Lucy Pretty Eagle was a real Sioux girl who died at the Carlisle Indian School, but the story of her being Buried Alive is just an urban legend, usually paired with the claim that her ghost haunts the grounds.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best:
  • Sophie, the late wife of Stanley and the mother of Violet, Lily and Rose in A Coal Miner’s Bride, is remembered fondly by her husband and children. It actually becomes a problem for Anetka, as both Stanley and oldest daughter Violet (who naturally remembers her mother more than her sisters do) are reluctant to fully accept Anetka because she's not Sophie. Violet gets better with time, but it's not until Anetka gives Stanley a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that he starts trying to be a better husband to her.
  • Played straight with Anetka's own mother, who was loving and spirited, encouraging her daughter to speak up and to be educated and proud of her Polish heritage.
  • Played mostly straight with Walter and Amelia Pierce, the parents of Lydia and Daniel in Like The Willow Tree. While Lydia remembers them as good and loving parents, her memories of their father’s discipline towards her troubled brother would be considered physical and verbal abuse nowadays.
• Disabled Means Helpless:
  • Averted in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Protagonist Bess Brennan has recently gone blind, and so her parents send her to the Perkins School for the Blind in nearby Boston. There, the focus is teaching Bess to cope with blindness in everyday life and educate herself so she can have a meaningful life.
  • Also averted with Patsy in I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly. She has a bad stutter and a limp, but she's very capable, and gains the respect of the other former slaves because she's literate and helps them learn to read and write. The epilogue reveals that she later became a teacher.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • In Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Bess and Elin's father is mentioned to have died some years earlier.
  • In I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly, Patsy's friend Ruth and Ruth's young son Luke had been forcibly separated from Ruth's husband/Luke's father John while they were slaves. He eventually comes looking for them and the family is reunited.
  • Sarah Jane Price's father has recently died in a diphtheria outbreak that hit their small prairie town.
• Dramatic TV Shut-Off: In Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Brenda switches off the TV immediately when the news comes on. Her sister Molly questions it, and Brenda says that — with their brother Patrick stationed in Vietnam for nearly a year longer — if they focus too much on the war they'll make themselves crazy.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping features several Jewish people being driven to suicide after the Nazis takeover Austria, the most tragic being of a friend of her parents jumping out the hospital window with her newborn baby. This eventually includes Julie's mother, who falls into a deep depression and kills herself after the Nazi raid on the family home.
  • Also, in Christmas After All, the father of one of Minnie's classmates shoots himself right as Minnie was arriving at the classmate's birthday party.
  • This happens to Jane’s mother in Land of the Buffalo Bones, after a deep depression following the death of her son.
• Downer Ending: Some of the epilogues end with this.
  • The book So Far From Home states in the epilogue that the main character died two years later of cholera.
  • When Will This Cruel War Be Over? ends with Emma’s baby cousin dead from illness, her other cousin almost completely insane, her mother dead and her father (who is also dead, but she doesn’t know that.) and love interest missing. Not to mention that her entire way of life has collapsed. The last entry is basically Emma having a breakdown.
• Dumb Struck: In Color Me Dark, Nellie's sister Erma Jean becomes mute after the death of her favorite uncle. It's later revealed that this is largely due to the fact that before he died, he revealed to Erma Jean that his injuries were sustained in a racially-motivated attack, and the story combined with his subsequent death traumatized her into silence. Erma Jean only regains her voice when she fears her father is about to meet the same fate, as her desperation to prevent this finally breaks through the wall created by the earlier trauma so that she can scream for him to stay home.
• Everyone Looks Sexier if French: The young French diplomat, Pierre, in The Winter of Red Snow is described as a Pretty Boy and Abby's older sister, Elisabeth, is so infatuated with him that she takes apart her cloak to sew it into a coat for him, which Abby resents her for because now none of them can wear it again to go outside. Abby finds out that he put the coat on his dog, much to Elisabeth's dismay when she sees it. She eventually moves on and marries someone else.
• Evil Old Folks: Mrs. Kenker in Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie is the closest thing to an antagonist in the book, as she constantly steals belongings from the other wagon train members while pretending to be a sweet and harmless old lady, which Hattie despises her for. She has a Freudian Excuse: her sons died in a fire that burned down her and her husband's house and everything they owned.
• Exact Words: In I Walk in Dread, Liv's uncle has gone away looking for work and left her and her sister alone. Since during this era this would be considered improper, but lying is a sin, he coached them in exact words to avoid lying or telling the whole truth if someone asks after him. "No, he didn't tell us when he was coming back." "No, he didn't tell us where he was going." "He was carrying a bag, so he may not be back until tomorrow."
• Fake Faith Healer: In Color Me Dark, Nellie Lee's parents take her sister Erma Jean to a supposed faith healer to cure her mutism. When said healer blames the treatment's failure to work on Erma Jean's lack of faith, their father promptly calls him out as a charlatan.
• Family Theme Naming:
  • The Anderson family from Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie named their first five daughters after trees: Hazel, Holly, Laurel, Olive, and Cassia. They break the trend with their sixth daughter, Eliza May, who is named after the ship that takes the family on the first leg of their journey (see Named After Somebody Famous).
  • In A Coal Miner's Bride, when Anetka meets her three step-daughters-to-be — Violet, Lily, and Rose — she is so taken aback that all she can think to say is 'what a beautiful garden'.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The Dear America series is chock full of deaths that are accurate to the time period of each book.
  • The death of the protagonist's love interest in the Titanic diary was a younger steward on the boat and couldn't get into a lifeboat.
  • There are multiple deaths that occur along the journey of a girl taking a wagon train out west (including one death from being swept away while crossing a river, and one brutal Death of a Child when the protagonist mistakes water hemlock for an edible root and feeds a bit to another young girl while preparing dinner).
  • So Far from Home, the one about Irish immigrant mill workers, includes the hair-caught-in-the-machinery scenario.
• The Fashionista: Minnie's older sister, "Lady" (real name Adelaide), in Christmas After All is an aspiring seamstress obsessed with all things Hollywood and fashionable, who makes her own clothes and sews outfits for her sisters. The epilogue mentions she went on to become a popular costume designer for many films and starlets.
• Fiery Redhead:
  • The main character of A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska complains about everything about her looks except her red hair. At one point she suddenly remembered that she was her mother's fiery redhead and started yelling at her ungrateful husband with a list of all the things she does for him. Anetka's mother had red hair when she was alive and was a spirted woman who was willing to stand up for herself. It's implied she encouraged Anetka to speak up and learn the (illegal) Polish language.
  • Lucinda Lawrence from A Line in the Sand with her Mother, they both have red hair and very strong personalities.
  • Averted with Kat Bowen's cousin Alma in A Time for Courage. Alma is a redhead while Kat is a brunette, but Kat is the impulsive one, while Alma reacts to trouble by thinking of clever things to say.
  • Simone's friend Francie from When Christmas Comes Again is a straight example.
• First Girl Wins: Gender-flipped, with roughly half of the protagonists who begins a romance in the story eventually marrying that guy.
  • Examples include Walter for Rosa in Valley of the Moon, Johnny for Maddie in My Secret War, Willie for Abby in Cannons at Dawn, Jake for Minnie in A City Tossed and Broken, David for Grace in Survival in the Storm, Yitzy for Zipporah in Dreams in the Golden Country, Antoine for Angeline in Behind the Masks, Tally for Emma in When Will This Cruel War Be Over?, Pete for Libby in The Great Railroad Race, and (eventually) Leon for Anetka in A Coal Miner's Bride.
  • A heartbreaking variation plays out in Standing in the Light. Caty falls in love with Snow Hunter, but after she and Thomas are dragged back to their English life, she never sees him again. The epilogue states that Caty never married and while it's never explicitly said, the last few entries in the diary implied that the reason for this is that after losing Snow Hunter she could never love anyone else.
  • Subverted in West to a Land of Plenty: Theresa's love interest in the book is J.W., but the epilogue reveals that though he proposed to her several times, she had decided he was too serious and always turned him down.
  • Also subverted for Piper and Bud in The Fences Between Us. They’re dating in the first act and set up to go down that path, but right before the second act, they break up. Piper marries a man she meets in college in the epilogue. Piper actually gets another aversion; after she breaks up with Bud, the book teases a potential relationship between her and her friend Betty's brother, but the epilogue reveals that Betty's brother was killed in World War II.
  • They don't actually begin a relationship until after the end of the diary, but Patsy from I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly has feelings for another former slave, which she discusses in several entries. The epilogue reveals they got together after leaving the plantation and were later married.
• First-Person Smartass:
  • Patsy from I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly is kind and helpful, but she will occasionally slip into this when talking about people she dislikes.
    James is still taking care of Master. Does everything for him. When Master catch a cold, James be the one who sneeze.
  • Once Liv Trembley in I Walk in Dread decides there are not really witches in Salem, she begins to speak this way of the accusations.
    Maybe all of the afflicted girls should be sent away, each to places distant of the others, and see if the witches still care to torture them.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • Cinda's brother, Lem, from A Line in the Sand has a pet raccoon, tries to take in a wounded raven, and is repeatedly noted as loving animals. He becomes a veterinarian in the epilogue.
  • Molly Flaherty of Where Have all the Flowers Gone is this, too. She owns a dog and a couple of cats, and the epilogue states she and her husband have six animals at home, all former strays.
• From Bad to Worse: Nothing goes right for the residents of New Yeovil / Hawley in Land of the Buffalo Bones. They go through: a long train ride, snow in spring, are conned into believing that there’s a fully formed town when there isn't (and that their leader knew but lied to them), several of their number leaving for a bigger town, having to drain the land in order to build anything, one of their number killing themselves, difficultly planting in a new land, culture shock, grasshoppers, a teenage girl eloping with a Native American, blizzards, illegal alcohol, starvation, an economic downturn and a leader who is ill equipped for these situations. It’s a miracle they didn’t go insane!
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Touched on when Julie is told about her late Cousin Eva, who turned down Aunt Clara's and Uncle Martin's offers for an abortion. Sadly she dies giving birth to a baby that lived for a few days.
• Grade Skipper: Molly in Where Have all the Flowers Gone. Her teachers actually considered moving her up two years, but her parents objected because that would have put Molly in the same class as her older brother Patrick, and they didn't want him to be embarrassed.
• The Great Depression: The setting of Christmas After All, Survival in the Storm, and One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping.
• Happily Adopted:
  • spoiler: Florrie’s adopted baby sister Cinnamaron in All the Stars in the Sky.
  • In the epilogue of Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie, it's mentioned that Hattie and Wade adopted the twins born earlier in the book, Sarah and Blue, after their parents died off-page in a buggy crash.
  • In the epilogue of Mirror Mirror on the Wall Bess's mother adopts Eva and she lives with the Brennan family for the rest of her life.
• Hated by All: In Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie, Mrs. Kenker is shunned and ignored by virtually everyone in the wagon train after her mass thefts of everyone's belongings come to light. When she shows up at the Christmas dinner held by Hattie's family for everyone who was in the train to Oregon, she's still a loner whom nobody talks to, except eventually Hattie.
• Hate Sink:
  • Most of the white characters in With The Might Of Angels are racist and abusive jerks, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
  • Ditto with the bigoted nativists in A Coal Miner’s Bride, who are only ever shown harassing, exploiting, or shooting the immigrants. The worst of them is Gomer Jones, who runs the coal mine and is hated by all the workers.
• Historical Domain Character: George Washington puts in a few appearances in The Winter of Red Snow. His wife, Martha, is a supporting character whom Abby and her sisters look up to and help during her stay near Valley Forge.
• Historical Villain Downgrade:
  • A very obvious example of a whole group being downgraded is in My Heart is on the Ground by Ann Rinaldi, which positions Carlisle School and its staff as well-intentioned and generally kind if misguided missionaries. This was understandably not taken well by those familiar with the reality. For example, when Nannie and her friends are caught speaking Lakota, their punishment is to not be allowed to close their bedroom door and having another student spy on them to catch them if they do it again. While being forbidden from speaking their native language is problematic in and of itself, the punishment for doing so in real life was a lot worse than a loss of privacy.
  • Similarly, the soldiers in The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow. Although the book makes vague references to "mean" soldiers, the sheer brutality of the march is downplayed significantly and the aforementioned cruelty is never actually depicted or described in any detail, while the book seems to go out of its way to show instances of soldiers being kind.
  • When Will This Cruel War Be Over? seems to be trying to do this with Emma and her family being good despite owning slaves, but it falls flat at some parts; Such as running a school for slave children when it was both illegal for slaves to be educated and slaveowners to teach them. However, most of their slaves flee anyway.
• Hopeless Suitor: Missy is this to Hince, constantly seeking his attention and bullying Spicy out of jealousy over Hince and Spicy's obvious closeness. Her affections not being returned drive her to the low of reporting him for spending his food money from traveling on gifts for Clotee, Spicy, and Aunt Tee, which gets him whipped by Henley, all out of envy that he didn't get her one too.
• Hope Spot: In A Coal Miner's Bride, after Anetka finally has enough and yells at Stanley for calling her a lazy wife and not appreciating all she does, he spends the next few days being kinder to her, kissing her, and helping with the children. Then he dies in a roof fall in the mine.
• Identical Grandson: In I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly, Patsy is certain that a woman who claims to be her fellow slave Nancy's mother is telling the truth because she looks exactly like an older version of Nancy.
• I Have No Son!:
  • In 'Dreams in the Golden Country'', when Zipporah's older sister Miriam marries a Christian boy, the family sits shivah for her as if she were dead. They eventually reconcile, however.
  • The epilogue of A Picture of Freedom reveals that William was disowned by his father for becoming an abolitionist.
• Illegal Guardian:
  • In Down the Rabbit Hole, Pringle Duncan's aunt and uncle move into Pringle's (very grand and expensive) home after her parents are killed in an accident, ostensibly to care for Pringle and her brother. They treat the Duncan siblings so badly that they run away shortly thereafter. The epilogue states that Pringle returned at the age of 21 to reclaim her home and her inheritance from her shocked aunt, who had believed that Pringle and Gideon were gone for good and so she would get what was rightfully theirs.
  • Although they are not guardians in the traditional sense, the slave owners in Clotee and Patsy's stories are this in a way since they dictate the lives of their slaves. The Henleys of Clotee's book don't beat her, but "Mas' Henley" did sell Clotee's mother to another plantation purely to spite his wife. He later murders Clotee's Uncle Heb, who cared for her like a daughter in her stead (he swears it wasn't intentional, but he was still unnecessarily rough with the man over an incident that wasn't his fault), and then banishes Heb's wife Tee, who had been the cook, to the fields because he's afraid she'll poison him. Meanwhile, "Miz Lilly", Henley's aforementioned wife, tries to emotionally manipulate Clotee by reminding her of how she and her mother were 'best friends' and get her to tattle on the field slaves.
  • The Davises, Patsy's owners, are not at all loved by Patsy, but after Sir's death, she figures that he wasn't the worst slave owner. He never said a kind word to her, but he didn't whip her, either. Ma'am, on the other hand, complimented her once.
• Improbable Infant Survival:
  • In Survival in the Storm, Grace volunteers at a hospital and at one point is sitting at the bedside of an old woman who begins recounting the birth of her premature and very frail baby son, who she refers to as "baby Jimmy". Hearing the story, Grace believes that the woman is going to tell her that the baby died, only for her to instead say that she supposes he's not really "baby Jimmy" anymore, as he had recently celebrated his seventy-fourth birthday. Grace is so surprised she can't even figure out how to respond, and it takes an effort for her not to start giggling.
  • In Land of the Buffalo Bones Laura and Cal nearly die of what is implied to be strep throat, but they're saved when Ozawa gives Polly roots that can be used for tea to cure them.
• Innocent Inaccurate: One where the inaccuracy is worse than the truth occurs in Standing In the Light. After Caty falls ill while she is a captive, she believes that her captors are torturing her when they take her into a hut and heat it up to stifling temperatures. She later learns that it's called a sweat bath and is a healing practice.
• Innocently Insensitive: In Color Me Dark, Nellie's neighbor, Miz Hamilton, remarks at their hairdresser appointment with her that Nellie has "good hair" because it's straight and Nellie's sister Erma Jean has "bad hair" that she can "fix" so that it'll look like white people's hair. Nellie finds her wording grating for insinuating that their hair can only look good if it looks like a white person's, or in other words...
  That made me boil on the inside, but I kept my mouth shut. Miz Hamilton is a nice person. She meant no harm, but she was sounding just like those Colored people who think the only way to look pretty is to look white. The only way to have good hair is for it to be straight.
• Ironic Name: In A Picture Of Freedom, William's tutor is named Mr. Harms. He's a genuinely kind man and is eventually revealed to be an abolitionist.
• In Vino Veritas: Stanley in A Coal Miner's Bride once behaves much more lovingly towards his wife, narrator Anetka, while drunk...and calls her by his deceased first wife's name. This leaves Anetka envious of his evidently happy first marriage.
• I Will Wait for You: Amelia is told to do this by Daniel when he joins the Union Army in A Light in the Storm.
• Just Friends: Madeline Beck of My Secret War has her friend Clara think she is in love with a boy she has started a club with named Johnny, although Maddie refuses to believe it, thinking she is Just Friends with him. The epilogue totally averts this. As an adult, Maddie gets back in touch with Johnny after high school and they get together.
• The Kindnapper: Caty and Thomas in Standing In The Light are kidnapped by the Lenape Native American tribe. Caty expects that she and Thomas will be hurt or tortured by them, but they're actually adopted by parents who had lost their own children and are treated as family. By the end of the story, Caty and Thomas are devastated to be taken away from them, and spend the rest of their lives trying unsuccessfully to find out what happened to their Lenape "family."
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Christmas After All, Minnie comments that she'd like to read diaries of "unfamous Americans", or ordinary kids who lived through historical events like the American Revolution and Civil War. This is the whole premise of the Dear America and My Name is America series.
• Like Brother and Sister: Clotee and Hince in A Picture of Freedom are close and have this kind of relationship, to the point that Clotee's nickname for him is "brother friend".
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Attempted by the Prettyman school staff in With The Might Of Angels: They let Dawnie into the school, but they make her sit outside the principal's office instead of attending class. That way, she’s in the building but kept away from the other kids. It doesn’t last long, as it's quickly clarified for them that the law does in fact require them to put Dawnie in classes.
  • In a more symbolic case, Clotee writes in Spicy's Bible that "Spicy's real name is Rose". Since "everything that's written in the Bible is true", this basically gives Spicy a reason to leave behind the name that was forced on her and take the name she should have had all along.
• Mama Bear: In A Coal Miner's Bride, Anetka and her step-daughter were being hit with rocks. She tried to ignore it until one of the stones hit her step-daughter at which point she says she became a mad woman like a mother cat and ran screaming at the culprits who threw the rocks.
• Marriage of Convenience:
  • Mem Trembley and Darcy Cooper's marriage in I Walk in Dread has elements of this. Mem will benefit because Darcy's family has good money and the marriage will get her out of Salem and away from the Witch Hunt, and the Coopers will benefit because Mem is a good cook and, with oldest son Darcy married off, next son Adam will be free to marry his sweetheart. Darcy clearly loves Mem, as well; Mem is less attracted.
  • In A Coal Miner's Bride, Anetka suspects that her husband only married her so that his daughters would have a mother. Her father agreed to the marriage because the husband-to-be would buy passage to America for Anetka, her brother, and their grandmother. After Stanley's death, various people try to convince Anetka to do this again, so she will have someone to support her and the girls, but Anetka insists that she'd rather work herself to death to support the girls than be in another loveless marriage, and says she will never marry again unless it's for love.
• Massive Numbered Siblings:
  • Minnie Swift of Christmas After All has three sisters and a brother, and gains an adopted sister when Willie Faye is sent to live with her family.
  • In Survival Of The Storm, Grace's friend Helen has two lazy older brothers named Leroy and Chester, a five year old brother named Henry, and an unnamed baby sister.
  • Polly from Land of the Buffalo Bones has three older brothers and a younger brother from when her mother was still alive, and after her father and stepmother marry, she gains two more younger brothers, and two younger sisters. Her diary ends with her stepmother pregnant again, and the epilogue reveals that she had a daughter.
  • Hattie from Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie was one of seven children until the summer prior to the book, when all four of her sisters died of fever, leaving only Hattie and her two brothers.
  • In Love Thy Neighbor Prudence has an older brother, Walter, a younger brother, Jacob, and three younger sisters, Verity, Kate, and Alice.
• Meaningful Echo: In I Walk in Dread, about the Salem witch trials, narrator Liv's sister tells her, "I fear that you are a witch, or will soon become one," echoing the words of William Good at his wife's examination. This causes Liv to worry she may be publicly accused as a witch.
• Meaningful Name: In A Coal Miner's Bride, Miss Ada Mackinder is pretty much the Token Good Teammate among the Americans Anetka meets.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • In A Picture of Freedom, Spicy tells Clotee that her mother wanted to name her Rose, but her master wouldn't let her. When Spicy and Hince run away near the end of the book, Spicy, at Clotee's suggestion, begins going by Rose to show that she's no longer bound by an owner's directives.
  • In Color Me Dark, Nellie Lee and Erma Jean start going by Nell and Erma when they move to Chicago to avoid appearing 'countrified.' However, near the end of the book, Erma Jean decides to go back to being called Erma Jean to show that she is proud of her family's Tennessee origins.
  • A negative example occurs in My Heart is on the Ground, as the Native American children are made to take English names as part of the forced assimilation to white culture.
• Military Brat: Maddie, the narrator of "My Secret War". Her father is in the Navy and has been stationed so many places that Maddie considers her hometown to be "everywhere". During the book, he's on a ship in the Pacific.
• Missing Mom:
  • Piper’s mother in The Fences Between Us, the closest adult female figures are her sister Margie and the family housekeeper. The ladies of her father’s congregation often served as her mother figures as well, and it’s one of the reasons why the discrimination against them upsets Piper.
  • Sarah Jane Price's mother died when she was four years old. She doesn't remember much about her that her (recently late) father didn't tell her.
  • Anteka's mother died sometime before the events of A Coal Miner’s Bride. Same with Sophie, Stanley’s first wife and the mother of Anetka's stepdaughters Violet, Lily and Rose.
  • Seeds Of Hope begins with Susanna, her father, and her sister traveling to Oregon by boat. Susanna reveals that her mother boarded the boat with them, but was washed overboard in a storm and died.
  • Clotee's mother died prior to the events of A Picture of Freedom.
• Mysterious Parent: Rosa in Valley of the Moon and her brother Domingo are orphans. They know only that their mother was a native and their father was white. Rosa contacts the priest who rescued them, asking for information. Turns out their father was the brother of the man for whom she and her brother are working as servants, and their newfound relatives welcome them into the family.
• Named After Somebody Famous: A variant in Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie. Protagonist Hattie Campbell and her family travel with the Andersons, who have a baby aboard the steamboat Eliza May on the first leg of the journey. Since the baby is a girl, they name her after the boat.
• Near-Rape Experience:
  • In The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow, the book comes as close as they can in a book aimed at preteens to implying that one of the soldiers was going to do this to Sarah Nita after she was caught trying to raid corn out of animals' manure at Fort Sumner. He's all of a sudden distracted by the soldier Sarah Nita refers to as "Mica Eyes" calling him out to a different area of the animal pens.
  • Anetka of A Coal Miner's Bride also encounters this at one point when one man assaults her, and it is only because her acquaintance Leon Nasevich appears that she is able to escape and subsequently move to America.
  • In The Great Railroad Race, Libby and Ellie sneak out to a "town" traveling with the railroad to see why their parents have warned them away from it. They are pulled into a saloon by a drunk man, and another nearly drags Ellie out the back door.
  • In A Picture of Freedom, the plantation's new overseer starts making moves on Clotee's friend Spicy, and it's only Clotee's quick thinking (claiming that Mr. Harms has already picked Spicy) that prevents him from following through.
• Nephewism: A variant. In Christmas After All, Willie Faye is the cousin of Minnie Swift's mother and comes to live with them because her parents have died and her relatives left to head west, away from the Dust Bowl.
• New Parent Nomenclature Problem: In Journey to the New World, the first book in the series, Mem's father remarries a recent widow named Hannah Potts shortly after his wife's death. Mem doesn't know what to call her new stepmother except for "Mistress Potts." However, she eventually starts calling her 'Hannah' after Hannah nurses her through a serious illness.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In The Winter of Red Snow, Lucy cuts off her hair (a big deal for a girl at that time) and sells it to a wigmaker in order to get some money to help her struggling family (although the money ends up getting stolen). When her parents find out, they're so furious that they subject her to a harsh and humiliating punishment, completely disregarding the fact that she did it to help them. This leads Lucy to run away in despair.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly. Patsy has a bad stutter and can't always speak as fluently as she'd like, so people think she's a dunce and don't expect much of her. Sometimes she plays it to her advantage, by pretending to be too stupid to leave the schoolroom after she's done cleaning it (so she can listen to the teacher and learn how to read and write) or pretending she thought it was Saturday when she skipped the white plantation owners' church services and went to worship with the other freedmen instead. Unfortunately, this also ends up working against Patsy; At one point, she tries to explain to other freed slaves that she can read and write, but they don't understand what she's trying to say. She finally gets her point across by picking up a book and reading it.
• Orphanage of Love:
  • In Like The Willow Tree, after Lydia and her brother lose their parents in the Spanish Flu epidemic and their aunt and uncle don't want them, they are sent to live with a religious order known as the Shakers that takes in orphaned children. While they have a few unusual rules (related to their particular religious beliefs) that can make adjustment difficult, such as strict restrictions on personal possessions, it's clear that the Shakers care very much for the children and want them to be happy. At one point, when one of the girls asks their main caregiver Sister Jennie if she has any children, she replies that she does have children — "all of you".
  • Voyage on the Great Titanic begins with the protagonist, Margaret, living in an orphanage. While Margaret notes that the situation isn't always ideal — the orphanage is often overcrowded, and money is limited — the orphans are never truly made to do without (i.e. they may only have fairly bland/basic food and donated used clothes, but they never go hungry or lack clothing), and Margaret describes the nuns who run the place as caring, compassionate women who look out for the girls and even take the time to form personal relationships with each of them.
• Passionate Sports Girl:
  • The book With the Might of Angels has Dawnie who is teased for playing baseball but the joke's on the boys who tease her because she is proud of it.
  • Kat is part of a field hockey team at her school and they are a nimble bunch.
• Parental Marriage Veto:
  • Jerzy and Lidia in A Coal Miner's Bride got one from Lidia's parents, who had arranged her marriage with another man. They ran away and married anyway, and when her parents found out they disowned her.
  • Jane’s father in Land of the Buffalo Bones is unhappy about her marrying a Native American man, but he’s unable to stop them, either.
  • Zipporah’s parents in Dreams in the Golden Country are shocked when Miriam marries an Irish Catholic man named Sean, to the point where they disown her, pretend she’s died and forbid Zipporah and Tovah to contact or see her. Zipporah refuses, and ends up finding her. The family reconciles in the end.
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: In A Picture of Freedom, Clotee's parental figures Aunt Tee and Uncle Heb were made to marry on Henley's orders. Tee initially disliked him, but they grew to love each other over time and are a Happily Married couple in the present, and Heb's death utterly devastates Tee.
• Pet the Dog: A number of examples across the series:
  • In A Coal Miner's Bride, Anetka's aloof, disrespectful husband Stanley gives her a nice set of bee boxes as a wedding gift, and later in the book, actually makes an effort to treat Anetka better after she gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  • In My Face to the Wind Mr. Gaddis agrees to outfit Sarah Jane's (new) schoolhouse properly after she guides her students home safely in a blizzard, proving she's a good and willing teacher to him and the school board. (The old one, a soddy, collapsed in the storm and was ruined.)
  • In Color Me Dark a boy who bullied Nellie Lee and Erma Jean helps them to safety during a riot.
  • A Time For Courage: Kat's deeply chauvinistic Uncle Bayard is shown to care deeply for his mentally handicapped daughter Clary.
  • In With The Might Of Angels, Dawnie’s science teacher gives Dawnie a good grade on her test and only takes off points for missing the name and date (which Dawnie really did forget to write down).
  • In A Picture of Freedom, the otherwise cruel Miz Lilly has occasional kind moments. She attends Uncle Heb's funeral and even cries at it, gives Clotee her daughter's old dress and shoes to wear (though it's implied this was a bribe, as this comes after Miz Lilly disregarded Clotee's warning about William intending to ride the Henleys' racing horse and she does not want her husband finding out about said warning), and when Clotee tells her how cold the field slaves' cabins are in winter, she gives her blankets from the attic.
• Point of View: All of the books are written in 1st person narration, as they're intended to appear like diaries.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Downplayed, but Hattie lists "Indians" as one of her fears before she and her family set out in Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie. She notably gets over her fear and makes a point of crossing it off of her list while actually on the journey.
• Practically Different Generations: In A Picture of Freedom, William Henley has a half-sister named Clarissa from his mother's previous marriage. She's old enough to have two sons with her husband while he's barely a preteen; the result is that he's almost the same age as his nephews and they act like peers.
• Preacher Man: Piper's father Pastor Davis appears to a be a straight example. Stoic, conservative, quiet, and with high expectations for behavior. When his Japanese-American congregation is being harassed, arrested, and sent out to camps, he joins them in solidarity, marking him a Good Shepherd.
• Preacher's Kid: Piper and her older siblings in A Fence Between Us, they are neither Angelic nor Diabolical but are decent young people. Piper struggles with not being allowed to wear shorts or lipstick by her father and with balancing wanting to fit in with her white peers and her father's solidarity with the Japanese American congregation. Her two adult siblings don't have to listen to their father the same way, but her brother Hank's decision to join the army pre-Pearl Harbor is not without drama; her sister Margie is the one who finally convinces their father to let up on Piper a bit.
• Rape Discretion Shot: In One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping, there is a strong implication that when Julie's mother was separated from Julie's father and Max, the soldiers gang-raped her. When she reappears, her dress is torn, she is completely withdrawn and traumatized (as it later turns out, to the point of suicide) and she refuses to say what actually happened to her to anyone.
• Really 17 Years Old: In My Face To the Wind, Sarah Jane Price lies to the Broken Bow school board that she's sixteen so she can take up the teaching position her late father once held. She's only fourteen, but doesn't want to be sent off to an orphaned girls' labor home.
• * Retirony: In Hear My Sorrow, Angela and Sarah are excited to hear that their friend Clara is engaged to a grocer, which will allow her to leave the sweatshop life to join the family business. Before this can happen, Clara dies in the Triangle fire.
• Romantic False Lead: In A Coal Miner's Bride, Anetka falls in love with Leon Nasevich despite her obligation to marry Stanley. Fortunately, the abusive Stanley dies two-thirds of the way through the book, and she eventually marries Leon.
• Scrapbook Story: Every book in the series is in a diary format. West to a Land of Plenty is particularly scrapbook-style, as narrator Theresa shares her diary with her younger sister, pastes in some documents, and copies in letters she writes.
• Shown Their Work: At the end of each book is "Life In (insert time era here) America" where it shows how life was like in America as well as historical background information.
• Sadist Teacher:
  • While thankfully not as common as the Cool Teacher, the Dear America books have a few. These include Mrs. Burton from Mirror Mirror on the Wall; Mrs. Caffrey, AKA Woman-Who-Screams-A-Lot from My Heart is on the Ground; and the majority of the Prettyman school staff in With The Might Of Angels.
  • The Minidoka camp social studies teacher from The Fences Between Us who decides to use the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack to needle each Japanese-American student about whether it was right to relocate Japanese American citizens from the Pacific coast.
  The coal in the classroom's potbelly stove has more feelings than she does.
• Secret Test: In So Far From Home, Mary's sister Kate, who works as a maid, tells Mary that wealthy women often test their maids by leaving money under beds and the like to see if the maids take it. According to Kate, her employer tried it on her, but she'd been warned about this trick by the other maids and knew better than to take the bait; instead, she won favor with her employer by immediately returning the money to her.
• Serendipitous Survival: In Voyage on the Great Titanic, Margaret is recruited to take the eponymous voyage with a wealthy woman because her husband's business plans changed and he couldn't make the trip. Had the woman's husband been on board during the incident, he would almost certainly have died, as few men survived the disaster.
• Sexy Discretion Shot:
  • Anetka in A Coal Miner's Bride, writing about her wedding night: "Some things are too private to write even in a diary of private thoughts, so all I will say is that I became a married woman, and it wasn't at all like I expected."
  • Done with Abby and Willie in Cannons at Dawn. While kisses and sleeping together with a bridal quilt are mentioned, Abby doesn’t write them down. Thus, the conception of their child is offscreen.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Kat in "A Time For Courage" describes Alice Paul as such.
  Alice Paul, this woman of action who has led marches and confronted congressman and senators, well, what I shall always most remember about her is her utter stillness. She is almost without motion, even when she does move. She is the calmest, loveliest creature. not a bit unwomanly or mannish as the papers often say. She is Slender and delicate with an utterly peaceful face framed with wavy brown hair. there is a cunning dimple in her chin that gives her an almost playful look, until you look at her eyes, which are large and gray and very serious. But it is the Stillness of her that most impresses. It is not the stillness of a statue nor one of a dead person — hardly! She is most alive.
• Shout-Out: In Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, Molly is a fan of both The Doors and The Beatles (especially Jim Morrison and Paul McCartney.) The title of that particular book is also a reference to a World War I poem.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Julie from One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping compares her late Trophy Wife-esque mother and Actor Aunt Clara.
  Aunt Clara is unlike Mother in almost every way. Her face is so expressive—you can always tell what she's thinking. And even though Aunt Clara is very rich, she isn't a show-off about it.
• Signs of Disrepair: In Christmas After All, Minerva’s cousin Willie Faye comes from a town in Texas called Heart's Bend, except that the B is missing from the sign at the railway station, so it says Heart's end. This happened during a dust storm, and Willie Faye claims it was a sign that the town had given up.
• Sleeping Single: In One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, Julie notes that her parents have separate bedrooms and speculates that this is because of her mother's intense migraines.
• Southern Belle: Lilly Henley in A Picture of Freedom pretends to be this in front of guests, being all smiles and politeness in a nice dress, but Clotee knows her as a cruel, abusive mistress who slaps her for minor infractions like walking too slowly or leaving one spot on a silver tray unclean.
• Spoiled Brat: William Henley in A Picture of Freedom starts off as this, being a self-absorbed and bratty kid who hates his lessons and demands everything his way, up to and including disobeying his father to ride an unruly horse for miles. A fall from that same horse that cripples his leg, combined with the influence of new tutor Mr. Harms, significantly humbles him and makes him a kinder person, to the point that he helps Clotee in the climax by vocally supporting Spicy's false claims that she was in a relationship with Harms, protecting Harms from being arrested for being exposed as an abolitionist.
• Stern Teacher: Sister Cora, the Shaker schoolteacher is described word for word as this by Lydia in Like The Willow Tree
• Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism:
  • Julie, in One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, finds some letters from her Cousin Eva. She described having "a condition" and not being angry anymore. Later the housekeeper, Susie, tells Julie that Eva was seeing an older man who abandoned her after it turned out she was pregnant. Eva was sent out to a hotel for her pregnancy and it turned out she died giving birth to a baby that lived for only a few days.
  • The pregnancies in Cannons At Dawn are referred as “big round bellies” and “expecting.”
• Supreme Chef: In A Picture of Freedom, Clotee's Aunt Tee works as the head cook for the Henleys (having originally been Master Henley's cook and only slave before he married Lilly) and is reputed for her excellent food. After Henley demotes her to the fields out of fear she'll poison him because of how he caused her husband's death, she focuses on cooking for the field slaves instead so that they can get a good meal after their work.
• Teen Pregnancy: Abby in Cannons At Dawn. It's a subversion due to the era, as she is seen not as a teenager but as an adult woman and married. It’s still a shock, though.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Mr. and Mrs. Bigg from Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie are described as this. Mr. Big is a small, disabled man with two amputated legs while Mrs. Bigg is a massive and stout woman.
• Token Black Friend:
  • In Look to the Hills, the main character Zettie is a slave purchased and kept by a young woman's wealthy family to be a companion to her. While Zettie and her mistress have a genuinely close bond and care deeply for each other, it's clearly not a friendship between equals (which Zettie realizes, but her mistress does not).
  • Miz Lilly in A Picture of Freedom invokes this when talking to Clotee, telling her that Clotee's mother, Rissa, was her best friend and made her so many beautiful dresses and she'd be more than happy to have Clotee as a favorite (meaning she'd get some nice things and a few extra privileges) if Clotee would just tattle on the slaves. Clotee doesn't bite, though she uses this a couple of times to her advantage (i.e. after Aunt Tee is sent out to the slave cabins, Clotee wants to go with her, and convinces Miz Lilly to let her do so by saying she wants to live with the other slaves in order to spy on them).
  • Inverted in With the Might of Angels, when Dawnie gains a white best friend in the form of Gertie, a new arrival at the school. Given that this is the segregated South, the race of Dawnie's new friend does not go unremarked upon. (Incidentally, a large part of their bond has to do with Gertie also being seen as an outsider, as Gertie and her brothers are not fully accepted at their school because their family is Jewish.)
• Translation Convention: Done differently from book to book in situations where English is not the protagonist's first language.
  • In A Coal Miner's Bride Anetka mentions a couple of times that her diary is in Polish: when she first gets it, she tells her grandmother that she wants to write her thoughts down in Polish (in defiance of the Czar, who wants to supersede the Polish language with Russian), and later when she mentions that Stanley can't read her diary, she says it's because he can't read Polish. She does occasionally relate things said in English, and it's not stated whether she's actually writing down the English words or translating the statements into Polish.
  • Italics are used in Dreams In The Golden Country to show when Zippy is writing in English as opposed to Yiddish.
  • West To A Land Of Plenty and My Heart Is On The Ground have Teresa and Little Rose write in their own imperfect English.
  • One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping and Valley of the Moon don't explicitly state what language the protagonists are writing in, but Julie (who speaks German) in the former mentions that she is learning English and Rosa (who speaks Spanish) in the latter explicitly says she doesn't know much English.
  • In A Picture Of Freedom, Clotee’s spelling improves as the story progresses, showing her development in writing.
  • Look to the Hills provides two brief explanatory notes invoking this trope; first that Zettie's diary is written in French, and later when she switches from French to English for the rest of the book.
• Traumatic Haircut:
  • In The Winter of Red Snow, Lucy has her hair cut short in order to sell her hair to a wigmaker (only for the money to end up being stolen), and when her parents find out, they shave off what's left of her hair and also forbid her from wearing a cap, meaning she has to choose between never going outside or showing her shaved head for the world to see. Lucy is so upset and humiliated that she runs away from home, much to her parents' distress. Abby, the only person who knows where Lucy is, is torn about whether she should tell or not; she eventually decides that she won't tell Lucy's parents where she is, but will tell them that she knows Lucy is safe and will come home once her hair has grown back to a respectable length. Near the end of the story, Lucy finally tells her family where she's been staying — with a family friend in, ironically, the same town where she initially sold her hair.
  • In My Heart Is On The Ground, the Native American children are forced to have their hair cut short upon their arrival at the Carlisle school. With hair having major spiritual significance in many Native American cultures, this is extremely traumatic for the children. Nannie later warns her friend Pretty Eagle ahead of time that this will happen, in hopes that being able to prepare herself mentally will make it somewhat easier on her.
• True Beauty Is on the Inside: In I Walk in Dread, Darcy Cooper has scars from the pox and a crooked leg, and stutters. Mem wants to reject his request to court her, but her sister, narrator Liv, points out that he is kind and would be a good husband.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: Where Have All the Flowers Gone? takes place in 1968. While it was written 30 years after the year, it's still kind of recent compared to the majority of the series.
• Victorian Novel Disease: Margaret’s mother in Voyage Of The Great Titanic had consumption, later known as tuberculosis. She had it under control until her husband died, forcing her to work in a sweatshop to support her kids; it worsened and she died.
• The Voiceless: In Color Me Dark, protagonist Nellie Lee Love's sister Erma Jean briefly becomes this. It's because her favorite Uncle Pace told her, in an off-screen scene, what happened to him; he was viciously assaulted in a race-driven incident. That, combined with watching him die just after he told her, traumatized Erma Jean into silence.
• Wham Line: Notable ones include:
  • "She was seventeen." That was the age that Mary Driscoll, the protagonist of So Far From Home dies of cholera. Meaning that everything she went through in her diary was meaningless in the end.
  • From Like The Willow Tree: "I have not written for eight days. What could I write? Father is dead. Mother is dead. My baby sister, Lucy, is dead." Completely changes the plot from a Slice of Life story in the 1910's to an Orphan's Ordeal plot.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Each book ends with an epilogue, explaining what happens to the main character, her family and her friends and others after the book ends.
• Witch Hunt: In I Walk in Dread, Liv experiences one of the most famous real-life ones, the Salem witch trials.
• Wicked Stepmother:
  • Stanley’s eldest daughter Violet seems to think Anetka is this in A Coal Miner’s Bride. She later grows to love her, though.
  • Subverted with Polly’s stepmother Mother Rogers in Land of the Buffalo Bones. She is a good person and cares about Polly, but they initially don’t get along, mostly due to Polly’s issues with her taking her dead mother’s place. They bond by the end, though.
• Would Hurt a Child: My Secret War had Maddie coming upon Nazi saboteurs on the beach and later being stalked by them. A car even tried to run her over!
• You Are What You Hate: In One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, Julie's Uncle Daniel gets into an argument with Julie's father. During it, he actually defends Hitler and claims that Vienna is, in fact getting overrun by Jews. When it's implied that her father reminded him that he's Jewish himself by birth (though he had since converted to Lutheranism), his response is that "I'm not Jewish. I haven't been for 20 years."

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