It's We Recommend, in which we use our superpowers to find readers the perfect book. Got a kid who needs a recommendation? Write us at thediamondinthewindow (at) gmail (dot) com with the age, reading tastes, favorite books, and any other relevant (or irrelevant) information, and we'll give it a shot. And really? All the good suggestions are in the comments.
Well, this one is tricky, for me, because you actually have to know something and not just glibly natter on about, oh, literature and stuff. See here:
This may be beyond your scope as an east coaster, but I have noticed that in my daughter's school, as they have been studying westward migration (lewis & clark, gold rush), there are virtually no women or people of color in the curriculum. I know the Lucy Whipple book. And of course there is Sacajawea. But do you happen to know any good books, fiction or non-fiction, about women/girls in the western united states in the 1800s?
Oh dear! The west! See, this question comes to remind me that I don't really know anything.
It occurs to me that there must be many, many Native American narratives about this, and...I don't know any of them. Not to mention Asian Americans working on the railroads...about which I know nothing. And of course—well, the whole wide world, which for the moment seems far beyond me.
I am striving to convince myself that this is, indeed, because I am an east coast person, but I know it goes beyond that into Race and Children's Literature and Whose Story Is History, and on and on. So I did the only thing I could: I went to my collaborators. Diana, who is normally quick with the feminist answers, said "History? You'd better ask her," meaning Chestnut, and Chestnut, lover of brave, historical girls came up mostly empty. There is a book, she said, whose name is like Kate's Journey, except it isn't Kate's Journey, except it's sort of like that, and it's about a girl on the Oregon Trail. Or maybe it's about something different....
You get the picture. So I have my last-ditch efforts. 1) To give you this:
(Image courtesy Amazon (could you tell?))
She dresses as a boy, she goes to find her father in a boomtown, adventures ensue. Chestnut liked it a lot. It could help out. But really, I am relying more on 2) Hey, readers? Help! Got any ideas to round out the story here? Put them in the comments.
