Why is Caroline wearing a pink dress as her default outfit when she loves to go sailing and just being outdoors in general, unlike other girls in her series (and time period)? Pink used to be the more default color for boys. Aside from her love of sewing/embroidery, Caroline's pink dress could be a subtle way of showing how Caroline is more of a tomboy, given her interests not being in line with expectations of the time. For a while the colors went back and forth without either being set, with Pink Girl, Blue Boy became de rigueur in the middle 20th century.
Yes, Kit's post-2008 pink clothes are out of character for her. They're not, however, out of character for her mother to have given her. Meet Kit has much of the early conflict over what Margaret projects onto her daughter (pink and frills) versus what Kit actually wants. They only get the air cleared about that situation after the family loses their main income, but it still comes up. The pink, flouncy, frilly clothes would likely all have been from before then, and afterwards, Kit rarely got new clothes as often (aside from hand-me-downs like the red Christmas dress from Ruthie, and feedsack dresses like the green and yellow versions of the birthday dress) and had to keep wearing the ones she had even if they didn't fit her as well in all senses of the word. (In Kit's Surprise she tries to hide her rick-rack trimmed dress under her coat from shame, since the hem was let down to come down long enough but is still obvious. In Happy Birthday Kit! she still has to wear hot stuffy wool winter clothes with long sleeves since she outgrew all her spring clothes and they can't get her new ones.) The pink Easter dress may be reused from the previous year.
Given that Kit's series takes place during the Depression Era, all that pink in her wardrobe also might be a function of her mother just making do and taking on whichever dress or material was available or affordable at the time and it just happening to be pink stuff on many occasions, since her mother wanted to dress her up.
An often asked question in the fandom is, "How can Addy have such a stylish wardrobe despite being poor?". Firstly, most of the pre-1900s Industrial Revolution characters (everyone before Samantha) have more clothes than accurate to their time since clothing had to be hand sewn, with the first sewing machine not available until the 1830s and still not easy to obtain in a far rural frontier location such as Kirsten's. Clothing took weeks if not months to make and was handed down to others if still in good condition or even sold to secondhand stores and purchased there (and modified for the wearer); clothing was so valuable that items were often passed down in wills due to it. So even though Addy is working class (while many of the other girls are from more well off families), it's not an clothing anachronism unique to her. Secondly, Addy's mother is a talented seamstress, to the point it was something she brought up as a reason the family wouldn't be sold since it made her valuable to their enslaver. It's stated canonically that she made Addy's new school outfit using scraps for lining from the dress shop and the dresses Addy and Esther wear to the New Years Eve emancipation celebration. So she likely made many if not all of the other clothes her daughter(s) wear, possibly with some inexpensive fabric, the aformentioned secondhand clothes, or fabric not up to the quality Mrs. Ford's customers wished for their clothing. (This also includes the holiday dress that was given to Addy by Mrs. Ford. Ruth worked on it for weeks, even though it wasn't originally intended for her daughter, and the dress was gifted to Addy and altered to her size with Mrs. Ford's help after the original customer rejected it.)
Also, although she's initially standoffish in Addy Learns A Lesson, Mrs. Ford ends up being a friend and supporter to the Walkers. It's highly possible she might have given Ruth spare materials, particularly if there was material that wasn't selling for whatever reason, and maybe even helped her with the sewing on occasion. (She did help alter the Christmas dress for Addy, after all.)
Because of their geographic locations and the development of technology, Samantha and Rebecca are especially likely to have had a chance to impact on each other, and the same goes for Kit and Molly. (This is assuming, of course, that all of the American girls save CourtneyCourtney is confirmed to live in a world where Kirsten, Samantha, and Molly are fictional, but there's no indication that the others are all on separate timelines from each other. live during different points on a single timeline in the same universe; if the True Heart games that used to be on the website are canon, then Felicity, Sam, Kit, and Molly are confirmed to share a universe.)
Josefina's birthday book states in the Looking Back section that girls were often given the first name Maria after the Virgin Mary and children got middle names based on the Saint's Day they were born on—hence Josefina's name, with her being born on March 19th (the feast day of San Jose/St. Joseph). It's likely her sisters all have the same name styling, as do her younger nephews, letting their birthdays be potentially extrapolated as:
Ana = Saint Anna, September 9th
Francisca = Saint Francis, October 4
Clara = Saint Clare, August 11
Antonio = St. Anthony, June 13
Juan = St. John the Baptist, June 23 or 24th
Fridge Horror
In Meet Addy, why would a man be so interested in buying a nine year old girl? It's quite possible that he wanted her in order to do something awful that wouldn't require a lot of moving around anyway. Addy acts clumsy to convince Master Stevens she's not old enough to go yet.
While escaping to a safe house, Addy and her mother come very close to a Confederate soldiers' campsite, with Addy having to go through it and only getting away because she's disguised as a boy and it's nighttime. Had the soldiers caught them, they surely would have sold Addy and her mother back into slavery, but older readers will probably imagine them doing something even worse had they realized they'd caught two female slaves.
In Josefina Saves the Day, Josefina and Francisca sneak into town unchaperoned for an important mission, they end up stumbling into a trader who drunkenly exclaims "What have we here? Two senoritas!" and Josefina has to trip him for them to get away; one can only realize the implications once they get older, especially with a 9 year old girl and a teenager old enough to be considered an adult in her culture involved.
Sarah introduces herself in Addy Learns a Lesson saying that she and her family recently escaped from Virginia. Felicity's grandfather's plantation is located there. He could very well have owned Sarah's ancestors, and his descendants could have—including Felicity, who could have owned Sarah's parents or other members of family (as she would be in her late 90s during the start of the Civil War).
In the books it takes just under a year—from early fall 1774 to summer 1775 before Felicity is reunited with the escaped Penny after freeing her from Jiggy Nye's abuse. With the movie, the events are compressed into a span of less than a calendar year (in rough movie order: the movie starts after Felicity's birthday in 1775 and at the start of her gentlewoman's lessons, which is when she meets and frees Penny; that summer has Felicity reuniting with Penny and autumn has Penny showing visible signs of pregnancy which doesn't go unnoticed by Felicity and her mother since her mother is pregnant too. In late winter, Felicity and Ben return home from a Christmas party and discover Penny in distress during labor). Given that in the movie Felicity witnesses Penny being abused by Jiggy Nye shortly after her birthday and when you take account horse pregnancies last for about 11 months give or take, Jiggy Nye was beating Penny while she was pregnant. Even though Penny's foal, Patriot, appears to have been born healthy, it's possible that he could have health issues that only appear later on.
Uncle Solomon and Auntie Lula treat Ben and Ruth Walker like their children and Sam, Addy, and Esther as grandchildren, respectively. Given Solomon and Lula's elderly ages, it's possible they could have witnessed their own biological children/grandchildren being sold off in slavery the way Ben and Sam were during the Civil War. Solomon has a sister on another plantation who has a daughter, but she escapes to the north.
Along the same lines, in "Shadows on Society Hill", Elizabeth and the Walkers have never met even though they're tangentially related (Lula and Solomon are found family to Addy's family and Elizabeth was Solomon's niece through his late sister Matty). That kind of thing was not only possible, it happened all the time; many formerly enslaved people didn't even know their own siblings at times because one had been sold off before the other was born, and those who might try to pass as white would recant all their relations to avoid being uncovered.
The plot of Marie-Grace and the Orphans is kicked off when Marie-Grace and her father find a Doorstop Baby outside their home. They later realize that the baby is the child of a runaway slave who surrendered him to prevent him from from being taken back. However....he’s rather light skinned. Meaning that either his parents were naturally light skinned at best, or at worst he’s a Child by Rape between his mother and her master (or one or both of his parents was). That being said, it's actually relatively common for African-American babies to be born with lighter skin that gets darker over timenote similar to how a lot of white children have blond hair as babies even if that isn't the hair color they'll ultimately have, so it's also possible that the parents just weren't especially dark and that because the child is so young, his skin hasn't darkened all the way yet.
Similarly, in the Addy books, Auntie Lula is an elderly slave who has lighter skin, reddish hair, and green eyes, traits that are likely inherited from a white ancestor. It's very possible that she was a Child by Rape resulting from sex between a white, red-haired master and his female slave (and if she herself wasn't directly, one of her ancestors probably was for those traits to have gotten into the family line).
When Yvonne goes missing after a protest in Melody's second book, it's a few days after the characters mention that a handful of other activists have gone missing; kids may not know their fate until they read the Looking Back section, but anyone who knows the history will recognize that those people were later found lynched, adding an extra layer of fear for Yvonne's fate. (She turns out to be alive, just with a broken arm, but it's worrying for a while.)
Molly Saves the Day is a slightly unnerving metaphor for how war can tear people apart. During the camp's Color War, Linda ends up on the Red Team while Molly and Susan end up on the Blue Team. Linda summons the Red Team to get Susan and Molly when she sees them (despite earlier telling them not to take the game too seriously), and after escaping, they decide they have to play dirty too if they want to win. Molly says to Susan, "You can't think of people as people during a war. You think of them as part of an army," and dumps a can full of worms and dirt on Linda later to distract her while she frees the Blue Army. Although nothing serious happens as a result of the girls temporarily turning against each other during the Color War, and they forgive each other, imagine if they hadn't. Or imagine a pair of friends on opposite sides of the real war that was happening at the same time, being forced to turn against each other—and the fallout from that would be a little more serious than not getting the other team's flag.
Molly's friend Susan is implied to be Jewish, as her last name is Shapiro. Since the books take place during World War II, what are the odds she has at least one relative who died in the Holocaust?
Reading Nellie's Promise, Nellie mentioned a couple times how her Uncle Mike had sold everything she and her sisters had for alcohol before abandoning them. Her special doll, Lydia, the one Samantha gave her in the first book, isn't mentioned in the later books of the Samantha series (Changes for Samantha, Nellie's Promise, and all of her mysteries), meaning that Uncle Mike more likely sold off Lydia as well. The movie thankfully averts this by removing the Uncle Mike subplot and showing her holding the doll when she and her sisters escape the orphanage with Samantha, and a Lydia doll was made for Nellie's collection.
In Happy Birthday, Kirsten!, Missy the barn cat has a litter of kittens, including a grey one who is so small that Peter and Lisbeth don't think it will survive. At the end of the book, Missy abandons the grey kitten, but Kirsten decides to raise it herself. However, the kitten doesn't appear in any further books and is never mentioned again. It's possible that it did die, despite Kirsten's efforts.
. Aside from her love of sewing/embroidery, Caroline's pink dress could be a subtle way of showing how Caroline is more of a tomboy, given her interests not being in line with expectations of the time. For a while the colors went back and forth without either being set, with Pink Girl, Blue Boy became de rigueur in the middle 20th century.