Dear Canada is a series of historical novels for older girls first published starting in 2001 to the present by Scholastic Canada Ltd. They are similar to the Dear America series, each book is written in the form of the diary of a fictional young woman living during an important event in Canadian history. Today, the Dear Canada books are very popular amongst Canadian readers.
Each book is written in the form of a diary of a young woman's life during an important event or time period in Canadian history. The Dear Canada series covers a wide range of topics, including: The arrival of the filles du roi to New France, the arrival of settlers to Canada, the banishment of the Acadians, the Seven Years' War, the War of 1812, the Metis, World War I, World War II, and many other time periods. The breadth of historical topics covered in these books through fiction makes the Dear Canada series a favorite teaching device of history school teachers around the country.
Here's the official site.
The books in order by era are:
- Alone in an Untamed Land: The Filles du Roi Diary of Hélène St. Onge, Montreal, New France, 1666.
- Winter of Peril: The Newfoundland Diary of Sophie Loveridge, Mairie’s Cove, New-Found-Land, 1721.
- Banished From Our Home: The Acadian Diary of Angélique Richard, Grand-Pré, Acadia, 1755.
- The Death of My Country: The Plains of Abraham Diary of Geneviève Aubuchon, Quebec, New France, 1759.
- With Nothing But Our Courage: The Loyalist Diary of Mary MacDonald, Johnstown, Quebec, 1783.
- Whispers of War: The War of 1812 Diary of Susanna Merritt, Niagara, Upper Canada, 1812.
- Footsteps in the Snow: The Red River Diary of Isobel Scott, Rupert’s Land, 1815.
- A Rebel’s Daughter: The 1837 Rebellion Diary of Arabella Stevenson, Toronto, Upper Canada, 1837.
- A Sea of Sorrows: The Typhus Epidemic Diary of Johanna Leary, Ireland to Canada East, 1847.
- Where the River Takes Me: The Hudson's Bay Company Diary of Jenna Sinclair, Fort Victoria, Vancouver’s Island, 1849.
- A Trail of Broken Dreams: The Gold Rush Diary of Harriet Palmer, Overland To The Cariboo, 1862.
- A Desperate Road To Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson, Virginia to Canada West, 1863-1864.
- A Country of Our Own: The Confederation Diary of Rosie Dunn, Ottawa, Province Of Canada, 1866.
- A Ribbon Of Shining Steel: The Railway Diary of Kate Cameron, Yale, British Columbia, 1882.
- Blood Upon Our Land: The North West Resistance Diary Of Josephine Bouvier, Batoche, District Of Saskatchewan, 1885.
- Days Of Toil And Tears: The Child Labour Diary of Flora Rutherford, Almonte, Ontario, 1887.
- Flame and Ashes: The Great Fire Diary of Triffie Winsor, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1892.
- Orphan at My Door: The Home Child Diary of Victoria Cope, Guelph, Ontario, 1897.
- All Fall Down: The Landslide Diary of Abby Roberts, Frank, Alberta District, 1902.
- That Fatal Night: The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912.
- Prisoners in the Promised Land: The Ukrainian Internment Diary of Anya Soloniuk, Spirit Lake, Quebec, 1914.
- Brothers Far From Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates, Uxbridge, Ontario, 1916.
- No Safe Harbour: The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1917.
- If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, Toronto, Ontario, 1918.
- An Ocean Apart: The Gold Mountain Diary of Chin Mei-Ling, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1922.
- A Prairie As Wide As The Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall, Milorie, Saskatchewan, 1926.
- Not A Nickel to Spare: The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen, Toronto, Ontario, 1932.
- To Stand on My Own: The Polio Epidemic Diary of Noreen Robertson, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1937.
- Exiles from the War: The War Guests Diary of Charlotte Mary Twiss, Guelph, Ontario, 1940.
- Turned Away: The World War II Diary of Devorah Bernstein, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1941.
- Torn Apart: The Internment Diary of Mary Kobayashi, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1941.
- Pieces of the Past: The Holocaust Diary of Rose Rabinowitz, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1948.
- These Are My Words: The Residential School Diary of Violet Pesheens, Northern Ontario, 1966.
Provides Examples Of:
- Abusive Parents: Arabella's mother gives her bed to a maid, choosing to kick out her own daughter rather than live without a servant.
- Age-Gap Romance: Hélène is fourteen and Jean is thirty when she accepts his marriage proposal, and another girl marries a much older man who had been twice married before.
- Babies Ever After: Some books have a boy that the heroine meets and befriends, after initially not getting along. The epilogue will mention them marrying and having children. Notable examples are Hélène and Jean, Geneviève and Andrew, Josephine and Edmond, Anya and Stefan, Harriet and Talbot, Julia May and Noah.
- 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. Also overlaps with the Downer Ending.
- Boarding School of Horrors: The main subject of These Are My Words. All of the children's possessions are taken away, they're forcibly cut off from their culture (having their hair, an important cultural symbol, cut and being forbidden from speaking Native languages), and aren't even allowed to do fun things when they're not in class, and this leads them to take out their frustration on each other which only makes things worse. The only thing Violet has anything good to say about is the food (and even that speaks more to the poverty that many of them live in when they're not there — it's not that the food is amazing, but that food is often in short supply at their homes, so simply having enough to eat is an upgrade), and that does little to make up for the misery of the experience. It's so bad that Violet is willing to move to the reservation with her mother and stepfather (she had previously lived with her grandmother) and deal with the complicated relationship she has with them if that's what it takes to avoid being forced back to the residential school.
- Break the Cutie: Rose goes from a cheerful little girl to a hardened refugee in Pieces Of The Past.
- Cool Aunt: Hélène's aunt Tante Barbe, who owns an inn and takes Hélène under her wing and is quite the deadpan snarker.
- Cool Big Sis: the main characters show elements of this if they have younger siblings, and their older sisters are this as well.
- Darker and Edgier: Compared to Dear America, which generally tried to find a way to make the stories at least somewhat optimistic even when the subject matter was dark. Dear Canada, on the other hand, tends to be much more frank about telling stories that don't always have a positive slant.
- The most readily visible example is Pieces Of The Past, Dear Canada's take on the Holocaust. Where Dear America told a story with a protagonist who escapes Austria early in the Nazi occupation, limiting the horrors she was exposed to, Dear Canada went with a story of a girl who didn't get out until after the war, so her memories include time in a ghetto, losing all her family members one by one (including witnessing the deaths of her parents), and spending several years on the run to avoid being caught by the Germans.
- Also the case for the respective stories about the Titanic disaster, largely due to the Dear Canada version being retrospective rather than real-time, which allows the writer to really dig in to how traumatizing the experience was even for a survivor.
- Dead Guy Junior: If the epilogue’s children are named, they will more likely than not be named after family members and friends who died during the diary’s period.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Commonplace due to the diaries taking place the past.
- In A Desperate Road to Freedom, Julia May and Noah get looked down upon by their fellow white townsfolk, with both Julia May's teacher and white friend's mother frowning upon her dreams to be a teacher.
- Even more so for Alone in An Untamed Land, Hélène and her sister Catherine are chosen to be filles à marier, French girls who are sent to New France (now Montreal) to marry men and raise the population due to the skewed gender ratio. Hélène is thirteen and turns fourteen while Catherine is sixteen when this is brought up. Hélène is pressured about marriage despite being only fourteen, with a suitor commenting that girls even younger than her marry, and her diary ends with her accepting a proposal from her friend's single father, who also comments that he is not that old, only thirty. Another girl also marries a much older man. There is also some discriminatory comments about Indigenous people due to the animosity between both, with some who kill French settlers.
- Orphan at My Door features heavy discrimination against Home Children where they are viewed as diseased in both mind and body, heavily abused and the Sadist Teacher is disappointed when any of them show good learning results.
- Disappeared Dad: In These Are My Words, Violet doesn't even know who her biological father is; her mother simply returned home from school with a baby and never revealed who fathered the child, suggesting that Violet was the product of a brief fling at best or a Child by Rape at worst.
- Drama Queen: Dorothy writes in her book that the mean girl whom she slapped after the latter said something insulting about the RMS Titanic sinking played up her injury for all it was worth, including sitting out of gym class.
- Evil Brit: Everywhere in Banished From Our Home. They treat the Acadians as barely human and take everything from them.
- Former Friend of Alpha Bitch: In To Stand On My Own, Bessie is a mean bully who in one scene begins verbally abusing and throwing mud at a classmate with no provocation whatsoever. At the beginning of the story, she and Noreen are friends, but when Noreen becomes ill with polio, Bessie completely vanishes from her life, forcing Noreen to confront the fact that Bessie was only ever going to be Noreen's friend so long as it suited her. (On the flip side, Ann, the girl Bessie was bullying in the beginning, turns out to be a true friend to Noreen, writing to and visiting her while she's recovering, even though they barely knew each other prior to Noreen's illness.)
- Happily Adopted: At the end of Orphan At My Door, Victoria's parents adopt the Wilson siblings.
- Initially subverted in Pieces of the Past, as Rose is placed with a foster family that is cold and distant towards her, but played straight at the end when her best friend Susan's loving family adopts her.
- Historical Domain Character: The books often portray several well-known historical figures in the books, although they are only background characters and/or briefly mentioned or seen.
- Honor Before Reason: In Days of Toil and Tears, after being injured and unable to do his usual work, Flora's uncle James quits his job entirely rather than be forced to do work he feels is beneath him, even though he knows his family really can't afford to lose an income, and also refuses to ask anyone for help because he doesn't want to accept "charity". Fortunately, James' brother manages to find a way to help them without wounding James' pride — inviting them to join him out West while wording the invitation in such a way as to suggest that James would be doing him a favor by accepting — but everything would have been a lot easier if James had been willing to prioritize his family over his pride in the first place.
- Illegal Guardian: In Orphan At My Door, Jasper Wilson's master Carl Stone is supposed to be his guardian until he is eighteen. Jasper is regularly beaten and even had his clothes confiscated, is starved to the point Jasper steals from the dog (who is just as starved), and when Jasper panics at seeing a cow after never having seen one before, Stone's response is to break his arm with a spade. It is a small wonder Jasper ran away. Carl is also a Big Brother Bully to his widowed sister and prevents her from seeing her best friend; she writes in a letter that she is grateful that Jasper escaped, and is glad that Carl never married because of how he would have treated a wife. Fortunately, at the end of the story, Carl is arrested for his abuse of Jasper, while Jasper and his sister Marianna are adopted into a loving family.
- It's All About Me: Arabella's mother has this attitude towards life, only caring about things for how they affect her personally and treating everyone else — including her own family — as though they only exist to serve her needs.
- It's All My Fault: In That Fatal Night, Dorothy is convinced that she caused the death of her caretaker, Miss Pugh, because on the afternoon before the Titanic sank, she threw Miss Pugh's things everywhere in retaliation for Miss Pugh yelling at her during a meal, and then when the accident occurred, Miss Pugh was dithering around and seemed confused and consequently didn't manage to get off the ship, which Dorothy assumed was because she couldn't find her things after Dorothy threw them around. However, a stewardess who was aboard the ship eventually tells Dorothy that she had found the disarray and put everything back in order after Dorothy went to sleep; Miss Pugh most likely just panicked and that's why she was acting the way she was. Learning this is one of the major things that allows Dorothy to let go of some of the trauma and begin to heal.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: Several of the protagonists have big families.
- In Banished From Our Home, Angelique has seven siblings.
- In No Safe Harbour, Charlotte is the youngest (by literal minutes, since she's a twin) of five, though she loses her two sisters (along with her parents) in the explosion.
- At the end of Pieces of the Past, Rose becomes one of six when she's adopted by a family with five biological children.
- Fee in If I Die Before I Wake has a twin sister, two older sisters (who are also twins), and a younger brother.
- Noble Savage: Books set in The Wild West or the New World often use this trope.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two Charlottes, Charlotte Blackburn and Charlotte Mary Twiss, as well as two Marys, Mary MacDonald and Mary Kobayashi, that have been protagonists. There have also been two Duncans, Mary MacDonald’s eventual husband and Charlotte Blackburn’s twin brother.
- Parting-Words Regret: In No Safe Harbour, Charlotte is sad to learn that her sister Ruth, who died in the explosion, was angry at her and Duncan in her final moments.
- Point of View: All of the books are written in first person narration.
- Raised by Grandparents: In These Are My Words, Violet lives with her grandmother when she's not in school. She only returns to living with her mother and stepfather because living on the reservation with them is the only way to avoid being forced to go back to her Boarding School of Horrors.
- At the end of No Safe Harbour, Charlotte and Duncan are taken in by their maternal grandparents after losing their parents in the explosion.
- Riches to Rags: In A Rebel's Daughter, the once-wealthy Stevenson family is left destitute after Arabella's father is arrested for his role in an anti-British rebellion.
- Run for the Border: Both Julia May and Mary do this in their stories, going to Canada to escape slavery and anti-British sentiment, respectively.
- Roman à Clef: Usually it will recreate things that happened in history, only on a smaller scale and before the actual even happens.
- Scrapbook Story: Every book in the series is in a diary format.
- Second Love: Andrew for Geneviève after Étienne dies.
- Shown Their Work: At the end of each book is "Life In (insert time era here) Canada" where it shows how life was like in Canada as well as historical background information.
- Spoiled Brat: Triffie Winsor is this at the beginning of Flame and Ashes, even remarking disdainfully on how she feels that her maid doesn't express enough gratitude when Triffie gives her secondhand clothing. Losing everything in the St. John's fire humbles her considerably.“I am not sure Ruby was properly grateful for this Act of Charity. I think those who are unfortunate enough to be poor should at least have the grace to show gratitude.”
- Trauma Button: Dorothy attacks one of her schoolmates after the schoolmate starts saying awful things about the Titanic sinking.
- Unreliable Narrator: Since all the books are told in first-person POV, the perspective of each is limited by the information known to the narrator and their level of understanding, and as such they may not be objectively correct in all instances.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Each book ends with an epilogue, explaining what happens to the protagonist and other major characters after the book ends.
