deborahmarkus7

Remember the old days when sometimes if you really wanted just one awesome song, you had to buy an entire album by the band in question? And you always thought, "Well, if I like this song by them, maybe some of the other ones are good, too?" And the album always, ALWAYS turned out to consist of that one really good song, one song that turned out to be pretty good, and ten tracks of boringness?

(Someone please explain to my younger readers what an "album" is. Thank you.)

Okay, this book wasn't exactly like that. But I did only buy it for the captivity narrative of Susanna Johnson. Years ago I read the YA novel Calico Captive, and the author included a little afterword about how she based her book on a true story of a woman and her family being captured by Indians. So I looked and looked and finally found a collection of such captivity narratives that included the one I wanted.

And it turns out that her story was really interesting, and one other story in the collection was pretty interesting, and the rest of them were okay but frankly kind of hard to read. Especially the one that was a diary, and some of the entries were just one or two sentences, and some of them were really boring things like, "The Sabbath day. It rained at night," and some of them shouldn't have been boring given what they were describing but still were, like, "Had the news of the Indians killing and taking four of our people." And I'm all, "Dude, I know you're a pioneer and all, but couldn't you show a little more emotion than that, considering what just happened?"

So I wouldn't recommend this to the general reading audience. I'll be reviewing Calico Captive soon, and will try to give more details as to just how closely the author stuck to the truth.