The Royal Diaries were perhaps among the most popular, as young monarchs of various countries shared their thoughts. When Dear America wasn’t enough, there were spin-offs to turn to.
Royal diarie books series#
Readers who stuck with the series visited all over time in America, including Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1847 ( So Far from Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl ), Mars Bluff, North Carolina, in 1865 ( I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl), Chicago, Illinois, in 1919 ( Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, the Great Migration North ) and, in a later publication, San Francisco, California, in 1906 ( A City Tossed and Broken: The Diary of Minnie Bonner ).
Death seems to plague every corner of the settlement, Remember is one of only a few children and is consequently rather lonely, marriage is often a thing of survival and convenience, and a new environment has plenty of features to create both anxiety and excitement (as new things often do). Remember’s diary entries can be quite frank and dark-a decent reflection of the colonist’s early years in what would become Massachusetts. Still, if it’s been a while since you’ve flipped through the pages of A Journey to the New World, you might be surprised to revisit it. Eight-year-old me had no concept of this, however, and nostalgia is a powerful drug.
It’s also worth noting that referring to the land as “the New World” is also symptomatic of a white-Eurocentric view as that part of the world clearly was not new to its inhabitants. The series might have done better to start with an Indigenous perspective, though the people native to the land we now call America play a reasonably sizable role in Remember’s diary. The first in the series, A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple,Mayflower, 1620 was written by Kathryn Lasky and is a fairly sensible start to a series about American history. The Dear America series originally held 36 titles but has since expanded and received a relaunch with updated covers in the ‘10s. If you don’t quite recall these books, let me help you out a bit: deckle edged pages, a detailed cover design often with a child’s portrait, a ribbon for marking your place, a diary format, a reference to a historical event or period. It’s been too many years to remember which of the two series I read first-let alone which book from either series-but the impression it left on me has never faded. But if this series is the catalyst for a young child’s interest in history and they then grow up to learn the truth about a time period, I’d say that’s a good thing overall.At the very back of the children’s room in my hometown library is where I first discovered the Dear America and Royal Diaries series. But one can say that this book gives children an inaccurate view of history that’s where I’d say the inaccuracies are a bad thing. So in that sense, the inaccuracies are a good thing it’s always a good thing to get children reading so that’s why I don’t mind the inaccuracies all that much. I believe Kathryn Lasky fictionalized some parts of history in order to get children interested in the story and to keep them reading. I believe it’s important to get children to enjoy reading and The Royal Diaries was a series I was enthralled with as a kid despite not understanding the stories at large. But, surprisingly, I don’t mind the inaccuracies. But as I said, the target audience for these books are ten-year-olds who likely don’t know what’s true or false. I should note there are several accurate events included the book isn’t fully inaccurate.
As an adult who has briefly studied this time period, I picked up on some of those inaccuracies. As this is children’s literature, the target audience isn’t going to pick up on them. Let’s talk about those historical inaccuracies first.
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