gathering dust

In my pursuit to read all the Newbery winners, no matter how bad, I finished another two in the past week. At the end of last week I finished A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-1832, which is as it's title suggests, is a (*cough cough* boring) journal of a New England girl in the early (*cough cough* boring) 1830s. Now to be fair, it's not that the author set out to write a boring book, it just turned out boring because we all know that NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENED TO PEOPLE WHO WERE FARMERS IN THE 1830s! We all know that nothing interesting happened unless it happened on praries, in the 1860s-1880s, and only then if the action revolved around a girl named Laura who had a blind sister, a fiddle playing Dad, and a house in the side of a hill (like a Hobbit) during one part of her life.

I really did want to like this book, being a huge journaler myself, but it was just too slow and uninteresting. Would I recommend it to kids: No, unless you really, really love books which take place in this time frame or are forced to read about the 1800s and you hate the Dear America series. Sorry Ms. Blos, I tried.

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