“Dear America,” I Love You!!!!

Dear America, you were a fantastic book series when I was in Middle School, I still need you at age 20. When I pick you up, with your beautiful square hardback and a colored satin ribbon to match, you fill that void that American Girls hasn’t been able to fill. You tell me in first person the stories of the girls and their times: like Mem and the Mayflower, Lucinda at the Alamo, Clotee trying to learn to read and write, Zippy advancing to the 8th grade and becoming a star of the Yiddish Theatre, Kathleen and her suffragist mother, Julie escaping the Nazis and learning hard truths about her family, Amber at Pearl Harbor, and Molly’s burgeoning feminism. I felt I was there with those girls. About those girls, maybe the weren’t beautiful, relentlessly polite, popular, or wealthy; they could be snarky, smart,strong, freckled, skinny, chubby, brave, and interesting just like real girls. Unlike the American Girls Collection where they were all ladylike, wore pink dresses, and mostly were super-privileged; Dear America dared to show us girls who’ve worked in factories, fields, and even as servants. You went even further and told us stories about a Tory Girl and a plantation owner’s daughter (just to give us a look on what they’ve been thinking), their lives were given a dark edge to them.


You didn’t stop there with girls: there were “My Name is America” about boys, the co-ed “My America”, and the Royal Diaries about famous princesses as teenagers, they were as intresting as their commoner counterparts and even sometimes questioned their own roles and examined their lives, instead of just relaxing in the lap of luxury.
You even had a HBO series about a few of the “Dear America” girls that looked like it took place at historical sites and had actual costumes; I still have my copy of “A Journey to a New World”, never botched the stories written by award-winning and even teenage authors, never Hollywood-ized.
I was sad when I heard the series was canceled a few years ago, to be replaced by “Mates, Dates”, “Gossip Girl”, and other much more marketable-but-inferior book series that couldn’t match your charm. But then I heard you are being re-released with new covers and with a new book about the Internment of the Japanese during World War II, the heroine is a normal self-absorbed teenager who isn’t a perfectly noble heroine related to the old Nancy Drew.

I miss you “Dear America”
, I hope a new generation will discover you and see what a fantastic series you were.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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