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A review by peytonktracy
A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower, 1620 by Kathryn Lasky
2.0
This review comes in two parts. The first is on this book exclusively, and the second is in context of other Dear America books.
First, I appreciated that the narrator, Mem, did come across as a child and wrote about things children would be concerned about, even if they were in as dire a situation as one of the pilgrims sailing on the Mayflower and settling in that first devastating winter in Plimoth Colony. But I also appreciated that there were big emotions in this book surrounding the loss that all the pilgrims experienced, because children experience those big emotions too. However, this felt a little like a Thanksgiving pageant in that there were a lot of moments that I feel like would not have been of note or recorded, like the landing at Plimoth Rock, but were documented just for the sake of including it since it's so famous? Mem would have had no idea that that landing would "go down in history" like she wrote about. And finally, I just ended up having a lot of complex emotions around this book with the more modern context around the pilgrim's colonization and interactions with the Native Americans so it was just hard to enjoy and take it for the positive light it was put in.
In context of the rest of the series, I think this book could have been better. As one of the first three published in the series, I give it some leeway since later books really showed the full potential for diving into history, ups, downs, difficulties and complexities and everything in between, in this format for middle readers. This just felt kind of simplistic and unnuanced when I think this story could be full of complexity of emotion and nuance. I just wanted more from it, I guess, knowing what it could be relative to other book sin this series.
First, I appreciated that the narrator, Mem, did come across as a child and wrote about things children would be concerned about, even if they were in as dire a situation as one of the pilgrims sailing on the Mayflower and settling in that first devastating winter in Plimoth Colony. But I also appreciated that there were big emotions in this book surrounding the loss that all the pilgrims experienced, because children experience those big emotions too. However, this felt a little like a Thanksgiving pageant in that there were a lot of moments that I feel like would not have been of note or recorded, like the landing at Plimoth Rock, but were documented just for the sake of including it since it's so famous? Mem would have had no idea that that landing would "go down in history" like she wrote about. And finally, I just ended up having a lot of complex emotions around this book with the more modern context around the pilgrim's colonization and interactions with the Native Americans so it was just hard to enjoy and take it for the positive light it was put in.
In context of the rest of the series, I think this book could have been better. As one of the first three published in the series, I give it some leeway since later books really showed the full potential for diving into history, ups, downs, difficulties and complexities and everything in between, in this format for middle readers. This just felt kind of simplistic and unnuanced when I think this story could be full of complexity of emotion and nuance. I just wanted more from it, I guess, knowing what it could be relative to other book sin this series.