Review - THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS

The Year We Were Famous - Carole Estby Dagg
Genre: YA Historical Fiction
# of pages: 243 (ARC)
Published by Clarion, Harcourt
Releases TODAY!

With their family home facing foreclosure, seventeen-year-old Clara Estby and her mother, Helga, need to raise a lot of money fast—no easy feat for two women in 1896. Helga wants to tackle the problem with her usual loud and flashy style, while Clara favors a less showy approach. Together they come up with a plan to walk the 4,600 miles from Mica Creek, Washington, to New York City—and if they can do it in only seven months, a publisher has agreed to give them $10,000. Based on the true story of the author’s great-aunt and great-grandmother, this is a fast-paced historical adventure that sets the drama of Around the World in Eighty Days against an American backdrop during the time of the suffragist movement, the 1896 presidential campaign, and the changing perception of “a woman’s place” in society.

Fabulous YA historical fiction! The Year We Were Famous has a lot to offer readers - fun, original story (that just so happens to be a *true story*), thoroughly interesting characters, and highly intriguing chunks of American history and geography. The story is based on the real-life experiences of the author's great-grandmother and great-aunt, who, in 1896, trekked clear across the country (Washington state to NYC) by themselves. The book is set against the backdrop of the American suffragette movement and the famous Bryan-McKinley presidential campaigns.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I began this story - I knew it was a historical fiction, but I wasn't sure how much history would play a part in the story. The further I got into the story, the more riveting it became! I admit to having a Google Images browser up for every place the characters mentioned. I seriously cannot imagine walking over lava fields in Idaho, crossing the Snake River, or braving through blizzards, much less doing it in the late 19th century, with no hotel reservations or ATM machines or, you know, Mapquest. Clara was an especially endearing character to follow, and her mom will charm and entertain you with her wit and determination, though I did find her a little strong and kind of overwhelming, and she seemed almost out-of-place, out-of-setting with her "New Woman" speeches. But still, both characters were well-rounded, and their interactions were entertaining and heart-felt.
I do wish the story could have been a little longer. I know it's not feasible to give each day/location out of their seven-month excursion its own chapter, but Estby Dagg has such a knack for bringing not only history but rich American places to life, I was left feeling full but still wanting more! The passages dealing with the Suffrage movement were thoroughly interesting, and I especially liked them because they reminded me of what I learned in my American West class last year - for example, that women were way more successful getting the vote in western states and territories than in the more "civilized" east, and that Wyoming was the first to grant women the right to vote (Utah had given them the vote, but that was edited out of their constitution when they were admitted to statehood, as a matter of fact).

If you consider yourself even a slight fan of Historical Fiction, or if you just like to keep up with the newest, coolest YA releases, you'll not want to miss The Year We Were Famous!

Final Rating

Check out my interview with the author!
Click here to view the trailer!

In My Mailbox [7]

In My Mailbox is hosted by the Story Siren.

Been a slow couple of weeks, but I did get some good stuff this past week!Received for Review
Awaken - Katie Kacvinsky
Special thank you to HM Harcourt!

Bought
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
You Are Special - Max Lucado

I had bought Chime (Franny Billingsley)...but after reading a few chapters and being unable to get into it (and then just skimming the rest), I returned it.

Books Read!Just finished
- Re reading Nevermore by Kelly Creagh (favorite 2010 release!)
The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg

About to start
Firelight by Sophie Jordan

Interview with YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS' Carole Estby Dagg!

Tonight I am pleased to have author Carole Estby Dagg with us! Her new novel, The Year We Were Famous, comes out this Monday, and I can say that it's one of my favorites of the year!
There is a lot of research that goes into any novel, particularly those in the historical fiction genre. For anyone who's ever wondered, "How do they find OUT all this stuff?" or "I wonder how much of this is true," we have a resident expert to answer some questions!

First of all, welcome to Imagination in Focus! Thanks for being with us tonight. Would you describe your journey researching you family and the historical time-period?

I started with two articles from Minneapolis newspapers rescued from a burn barrel after Great-grandmother Helga died. Even after writing to librarians across the country for more newspaper articles, though, I couldn’t find out much more about the walk itself, so I broadened the research to the places Clara and Helga passed through and the people they met.

There’s danger in being a research person. I can spend half a day researching what kind of compass Eric might have given Clara, right down to finding antique compasses on E-bay and taking notes on the wording on the box of a Keuffel and Esser. I’d guess 99% of my research never makes it into the book in a way that is obvious to the reader, but it helps draw me into that other world. Besides – it’s fun.

For The Year We Were Famous, I read biographies of the people they met, habits of bears and rattlesnakes, frontier cures for blisters, and the history of women’s suffrage. I found an old atlas with maps of all the old railroad lines and spent weeks establishing a plausible day-by-day route for every mile of their 232-day trek. Besides reading books, I scrolled through microfilm of old newspapers for articles on the presidential race of 1896, and took notes on the ads for corsets, bicycle costumes, bicycles and typewriters. I drove part of Clara and Helga’s route with my daughter and stopped in at a little museum in Rawlins, Wyoming, where I bought a pamphlet about a Victorian-era local woman doctor who became the model for Clara’s ‘someone to talk to.’ I approached the Internet like a treasure hunt, hopping from clue to clue to research relevant trivia like the history of Underwood typewriters, the elevation of the pass in the Blue Mountains, and what the Indian Agent for the Umatilla reservation looked like.

E-bay was another great source research. I bought a rubberized poncho of the type Clara might have worn, and bid on period postcards of the places they passed through. A postcard of Mrs. William McKinley helped inspire the chapter on meeting the president. Another postcard depicting Umatilla twins laced into cradleboards found its way into another chapter.

To get into the head of a young woman of the late Victorian age, I gave up reading contemporary fiction for a year and read only books Clara might have read for school or for diversion. I found dime novels on the Internet, and that that florid writing style influenced how I had Clara write about shooting the brigand in Oregon and demonstrating the curling iron to Native Americans in Utah. All told, I tallied up about six million words of background reading.

I never would have thought of E-bay! Research does seem challenging, but also really fun and informative. What were the challenges of blending fact and fiction?

I didn’t intend to write fiction. I couldn’t find enough facts about the walk itself, thought, so I had to start connecting the dots between known facts with my imagination. It took years to work up to putting words into the mouths of Clara and Helga. They were real people, my Great-aunt and Great-grandmother, and they weren’t still around to defend themselves if I portrayed them inaccurately. But to write about characters anyone would want to read about, I had to ascribe motives and dreams to them. Although I didn’t know what they thought and felt, by reading diaries and biographies of other women of the times—particularly suffragists—I could at least give them the thoughts of the collective New Woman.

Whose writing has influenced you, and who do you like to recommend to young adults?

As an eight or nine year-old, I read most of the Victorian children’s classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, George MacDonald’s Princess and Curdie books, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Dinah Craik’s Little Lame Prince, and the Fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson. Besides the Victorians, I enjoyed books with a hint of fantasy, like My Father’s Dragon, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,series; books set in other eras and places, like the Betsy-Tacy series and Anne of Green Gables; and books which featured braver and more talented children that I could pretend to be, like Posy and her sisters in Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes and the Melendy children in The Saturdays.

Thank you very much for joining me! It's been great to have an author's insight into what it takes to balance research and writing.

Carole Estby Dagg's The Year we were Famous is published by Clarion (Harcourt) and will be released this Monday!

Carole Estby Dagg's website

On Goodreads

The Year We Were Famous @ Amazon

Really exciting trailer!

Hey guys!
Sorry for the absence - I had a really cool thing happen last week work-related (way to get some really cool job experience!), so that's why I wasn't able to upload anything new!

But anyway -
I'm really excited because, in addition to having no less than 6 weeks of school until my undergrad career is OVER, a book that I'm really looking forward to releases next week!

Carole Estby Dagg's The Year We Were Famous is about to make its bookstore debut, and I wanted to share the awesome trailer with you all. Check it out! Add it to your TBR list!
Maybe even PREORDER IT!

My review will be up this weekend, and on Friday, the author (Carole Estby Dagg) will be stopping by Imagination in Focus to answer some questions about her writing journey.
I hope you guys will be here!

Inspirational images: Ode to Color

because sometimes life just needs a little bit of color...

Book "reviews" that are a little different...

In the entire time I've had this site, I've done only a handful of reviews that weren't either MG or YA. I've all but completely stopped reading adult fiction, though I've posted a few reviews of those books up here.
Quick memory-lane trip: I first started reading YA regularly in fall 2008, with the Twilight series (and I am one of the rare breed of lit lovers that actually doesn't have anything bad to say about that series, except that Bella was annoying and Jacob could fall in a hole for all I cared) and I've read mostly MG-YA ever since. But before that, I went through about two years of nonfiction history period, and it's been this last reading slump that has rekindled my love of well-written historical nonfiction.

History is, pretty much, utterly fascinating to me, but I've always had a soft spot for Early Modern to Nineteenth Century European history (and American history, of course) and in particular, I've loved royal history. Some of the kookiest, craziest, funniest, grossest characters in the history of man weren't actually *characters* at all - they were entirely real!
And I've always loved reading about them, especially after I got into "The Tudors."
(Note: what I learned from studying Tudor court-England is that they were not all skinny and pretty...in fact, most of them were fat and poxy!)
In particular, there are three books that I want to review/recommend to you. I know that a lot of history books are written like textbooks or WORSE - dissertations, agghh! - but these three are written in such witty, engaging and engrossing detail, it's as if you're reading short stories about crazy-entertaining characters:

Royal Babylon - Karl Shaw

Do you want to know which queen has the unique distinction of being the only known royal kleptomaniac? Or which empress kept her dirty underwear under lock and key? Or which czar, upon discovering his wife's infidelity, had her lover decapitated and the head, pickled in a jar, placed at her bedside?

Royally dishing on hundreds of years of dubious behavior, Royal Babylon chronicles the manifold appalling antics of Europe's famous families, behavior that rivals the characters in an Aaron Spelling television series. Here, then, are the insane kings of Spain, one of whom liked to wear sixteen pairs of gloves at one time; the psychopathic Prussian soverigns who included Frederick William and his 102-inch waist; sex-fixated French rulers such as Philip Duke D'Oreleans cavorting with more than a hundred mistresses; and, of course, the delightfully drunken and debauched Russian czars - Czar Paul, for example, who to make his soldiers goose-step without bending their legs had steel plates strapped to their knees. But whether Romanov or Windsor, Habsburg or Hanover, these extravagant lifestyles, financed as they were by the royals' badgered subjects, bred the most wonderfully offbeat and disturbingly unbelievable tales - and Karl Shaw has collected them all in this hysterically funny and compulsively readable book.

I would have to say that this is my favorite of the three. My copy is so worn, you can see white edges all across the spine and cover edges, but it gives probably the most extensive history of European monarchy. If you have in interest in the British royal family, in particular (or British history, for that matter), you'll want to take a look at this!

Royalty's Strangest Characters - Geoff Tibballs

Just as the monarchy has been hereditary in many countries, so insanity has been hereditary in many monarchs. Here are 2,000 years of crazy kings and potty potentates, including such infamous characters as Caligula and Vlad the Impaler.

I remember staying up all night to read this one - it's a fast but substantial read. This one focuses more on non-European royal history, covering Chinese and Middle Eastern dynasties and African tribal leaders as well. My favorite chapter, though, is the "Foot-in-Mouth Disease" chapter on Britain's Prince Philip :P

A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes and Emperors - Michael Farquhar.

From Nero's nagging mother (whom he found especially annoying after taking her as his lover) to Catherine's stable of studs (not of the equine variety), here is a wickedly delightful look at the most scandalous royal doings you never learned about in history class.

Gleeful, naughty, sometimes perverted-like so many of the crowned heads themselves-A Treasury of Royal Scandals presents the best (the worst?) of royal misbehavior through the ages. From ancient Rome to Edwardian England, from the lavish rooms of Versailles to the dankest corners of the Bastille, the great royals of Europe have excelled at savage parenting, deadly rivalry, pathological lust, and meeting death with the utmost indignity-or just very bad luck.

If there was one book that I could recommend to you all, it's this one. I absolutely love Farquhar's writing style and think it is absolutely amazing that he can make history (even ancient history) so interesting and fun. I think my favorite expression of his is "macabre comedy of errors." What makes this book different from the others is its inclusion of Roman history and Papal history (yes, those popes...my, my!)

These are three of my favorite history books that deserved some notice on my little book blog :)
I don't know if history is your thing, but I think everyone might find a fascinating tidbit or two in these books - whether you're a history major like me, or a quantum physicist!

I'm Only (Partly) Kidding!

It's funny to me the lengths some folks will go to in order to explain a love triangle.
I just read the longest, and the funniest, "In Defense" article in over 1 year of reading-and-blogging.
There are just some things in life I know I'll never understand, and love triangles is one of them - one of those literary foibles - along with "books that use a deus ex machina to solve their plots" and "not knowing that the hot new guy at school who's quiet and likes to read poetry is some paranormal dude" and the literary math equation "if the main character and the love interest get together in book one, and the series is a trilogy, how long will they be together before the 'trouble in paradise' cliche begins?"
Oh love triangles, please go away! You only make an impressionable protagonist look like a hoe.
Au revoir!