YMMV / Dear America

• Anvilicious: Often used with the Noble Savage trope, and is in practically every book, especially those containing delicate issues such as race and equality.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: My Heart Is on the Ground tries to portray Nannie playing a Pilgrim character in the school’s Thanksgiving play as a happy ending, but Native reviewers have pointed out that it comes across as a Downer Ending, as Nannie has been brainwashed to accept white customs over her indigenous people and roots.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In Hear My Sorrow, after her sister and cousin start working at the Triangle factory, Angela makes several comments to the effect that she wouldn't want to work so high up, as the factory is on the eighth and ninth floors of the tall (for the time) Asch building. Both in the book and in Real Life, this height was a massive part of why the Triangle factory fire was so lethal; the fire department ladders weren't tall enough to reach the critical floors to rescue the trapped girls, and the hoses also couldn't spray high enough to do any good.
  • In another scene in Hear My Sorrow, Angela learns that her friend Clara is being set up with a man who is a grocer, and she is happy for her because Clara will be able to leave factory work to work alongside her husband. Clara dies in the Triangle fire.
    • Rosa also gets engaged to the man she's been courting for most of the book about a month before the Triangle fire. She doesn't survive either.
  • In One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, we learn about the cruelty done to the Jewish community by the Nazis. This is before the worst of the Holocaust.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In When Will This Cruel War Be Over?, the two Broyles daughters are named Lucy and Lily.
• Iron Woobie: The situations they are in makes a lot of the protagonists this; in fact, they all may fall into this category at various points. Special mention to:
  • Clotee, who grew up in slavery.
  • Julie, separated from family and friends and forced to endure persecution in pre-Holocaust Vienna. She then suffers what can only be called instances of PTSD in America.
  • Nannie Little Rose, a Native American girl forcibly assimilated in a Boarding School of Horrors.
  • Bess Brennan, who goes blind and has to deal with the challenges and prejudice toward disability in her era.
    • Her friend Eva doubly qualifies, since she not only endures, but exceeds all expectations and becomes a singer and masseuse.
  • Anekta has to not only flee her homeland, but endure a loveless marriage before being widowed and not only has to raise three young girls by herself, she also has to deal with the debt her husband left behind.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Cousin Rachel from When Will This Cruel War Be Over?. During the book, she displays erratic behavior, much of it involving boys and their evil. This led some readers to believe that she was a Woman Scorned, or assaulted or perhaps had a love that ended badly. Others believed she was getting involved in women’s rights. The epilogue reveals.....she had a nervous breakdown, with the cause unknown. Very anticlimactic.
  • Some believe that The Fences Between Us would have been better if the POV character was Betty Sato instead of Piper, due to Betty’s potential in providing a first-hand account of the racism and interment and Piper’s Bratty Teenage Daughter tendencies making her unlikeable at times. It would also have given the series some much-needed Asian-American representation; as of this writing, not a single book has an Asian protagonist (in contrast to the My Name is America series, which has a Japanese-American protagonist in The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In A City Tossed And Broken, Minnie unwittingly finds herself posing as Lily Sump, the rich girl she was acting as a maid to. This could have formed the basis for an interesting story where Minnie actually takes on Lily's identity as a long-term thing and has to try to adapt to living Lily's life, but instead it becomes a near-insignificant piece of a larger arc, and her cover is blown after a few days anyway.