Girl Who Gossips.’ For a more long time she has no words.” You see? This isn’t even a good way of writing someone who’s learning English. The council fire burns bright between Maggie and Missus Mary now. Sample of just how awful the text is we’re dealing with: “’No,’ I bed, ‘please. Her brother is off in the boys’ section making friends with a Pawnee kid, an enemy of theirs, and Nannie worries about that, and they’re trying to teach the girls to cook white food and all that other jazz. Nannie is amazed at how the white people know everything, wow, as if the Lakota don’t have any knowledge of their own, and how the “Sioux” lost all their land in bad treaties and the white people asked for Indian children to go to their schools to learn the white ways. All of this is done in terrible stereotypical English, where she calls her diary “talking leaves” before she learns the word “die-eerie,” and I’ll point out that no one says “diary” like that, and also that’s not at all a phonetic spelling. This is one of those books where the premise is “someone who doesn’t write English learns to do it better.” The same thing is done in Dreams of the Golden Country, except better.
If you wanted to read an accurate and well-written book about Lakota girls growing up, you should have picked a better one. Nannie is a Lakota girl sent to the Carlisle Indian School with her brother, Conrad, in order to learn the “white man’s ways” and “bring honor” to her people.
Ann Rinaldi wrote this book! What the hell? Anyway, just go read this, it’s going to point out that fifty bajillion factual errors, while I’m going to focus on everything that’s wrong with the book from a literary standpoint. I might as well start off by linking to a much better review that points out the millions of things wrong with this book: besides the numerous factual errors, like the fact that a girl from this specific nation would have never described herself as Sioux (way to put that on the COVER), the fact that Captain Pratt is treated as a model of reason in the book, while in real life he was a bully and an autocrat who tried to beat the Indian out of the students at the Carlisle Indian School. My Heart Is On The Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, A Sioux Girl, Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 1880, Ann Rinaldi, 1999. Strong words for a DA book! That’s because it’s horrifyingly bad! Or, in the case of this one, the books that were a complete waste of paper and ink. Can you believe I’ve reviewed almost every book in the Dear America series? Unfortunately that means we’re down to the books I didn’t like all that much.
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