Molly, because she is fifteen years old, is also concerned with boys at her school, what to wear, what her friends are up to, and so on, and because Ellen Emerson White is terrific, it’s all done with a pretty light hand so as not to seem overwhelming. At the opening of the book he’s only just arrived in-country, so her family is still adjusting to the idea. Her father is a firefighter and her older sister is married with two young children, and her previously-mentioned brother Patrick is eighteen and serving a 13-month stint in the Marines. Molly is a little older than the average protagonist, at 15-turning-16, and lives in Boston with her Irish Catholic family. I digress already, but this is a really interesting book for a lot of reasons. I know for a fact that these two books have been used in teaching the era in history classes, which I think is very interesting, but also because both of these books have some great points and some flawed points. Patrick is the protagonist Molly’s brother, and the two books cover very different aspects of the war. It doesn’t feel historical in the same way that, say, the Second World War does.Īnyway, this book is the only Dear America with a specific companion book, which I’ll cover next week-that being The Journal Of Patrick Seamus Flaherty, United States Marine Corps, Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968. It’s been fifty years, but I wonder if there’s ever going to be a resurgence in fiction covering that period for that very reason.
A large part of focus on the Vietnam War was also the presence of media (television-but also print journalism) for the very first time in wartime, and so the Vietnam conflict feels much more “current” than, say, Korea, even though they’re quite close in terms of years.Īmerican Girl ran into a similar problem when they tried to release a “historical” doll set in 1974-despite the “cool” factors of bell-bottoms and glasses and whatnot, there’s a lack of not temporal distance but emotional distance in time, which is what I think causes the unpopularity. Reading this book is like reading a book about your parents (or, for young readers, your grandparents, which is equally horrifying in its own way), because I think not quite enough time has passed for it to have the interesting “historical fiction” factor. It’s a little strange to think that the Vietnam War era is definitely considered “historical” now, which is why I think this book didn’t really echo with the audience the way it was intended to. Where Have All The Flowers Gone? The Diary of Molly MacKenzie Flaherty, Boston, Massachusetts, 1968, Ellen Emerson White, 2002. How modern can a book’s setting be to still consider it historical fiction?
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