Tag: book club

  • Meet Julie

    Meet Julie

    No turning back now

    Author: Megan McDonald

    It’s the 1970s. Bust out your mood rings and pet rocks!

    The American Girl series is starting to feel more decades day at school and less about American history. Yes, it is important to remember that recent history is still history for kids, but it’s not like Julie’s mood ring is something kids would never see today. Heck, kids today still see fights about who gets to play on the gendered sports teams… it just looks different in 2025.

    Julie’s personality

    We are introduced to Julie as she is doing cartwheels. She is spinning, her life is turing upside-down. Like the other American Girl introductions this is Julie’s theme: Jukie is tumbling through the world looking for the right way up. Julie is struggling for identity. She doesn’t even know her favorite color!

    Julie’s parent’s just got divorced, she’s moving and starting a new school, it’s the 1970s! Any of those alone can shake up your self-image, and Julie has to deal with all of it. She is very unsure of who she is and where she belongs in the world. Julie is also a Gen Xer, so not feeling like she belongs is to be expected.

    Julie’s Family

    Julie’s Mom is introduced to us taking down a hanging geranium plant. Geraniums symbolize folly. Is this telling us that the marriage was folly, or that Mom is a foolish person?

    I like the representation of Julie’s parents. Something that bothers me in children’s media is when divorced parents are so united that you have to wonder why it didn’t work out… It’s very clear why Julie’s parents are divorced. Her dad is a straight laced kind of guy, her mom is a hippie. I get why it didn’t work out.

    Basketball

    So I did the math, Julie would have been born in 1965, and according to the generally accepted generation breakdowns, that is the very first birth year of Gen X. Like most Gen Xers, Julie is a latch-key kid. Julie takes up basketball as a way of avoiding the empty house. Julie’s fight to get on the basketball team feels very Gen X, she refuses to blindly trust authority figures, and she questions everything.

    I think the school should have started a girl’s basketball team. Julie being the ONLY girl on the team is going to cause her social problems. She can’t bond with her teammates in the locker room, and she will be ostracised by the other girls. The other girls will be jealous that Julie found a way to stand out, and being yourself and standing out is not how you make friends as a pubescent girl. Yeah, girls are like that.

    Best Friends

    Speaking of girls why did Ivy apologize? She just didn’t want to spend her whole Saturday getting signatures for Julie’s petition. Julie never asked Ivy to help her, she just blindly assumed Ivy would. Poor Ivy was dragged around the streets of San Francisco, and her best friend Julie was completely clueless about Ivy’s obvious discomfort… I seriously want to know why Ivy owes Julie an apology.

    All in all Julie is a fun character, but you can start to see the cracks in the original American Girl concept starting to form: it’s not like Julie is wearing a shift and stays, she wears blue jeans and tanktops, the cut and colors might be different, but kids still see those cloths today. Julie’s world just isn’t so different from the world today that tactile play (dolls) will help kids understand it.

  • Meet Josefina

    Meet Josefina

    What an adventure

    Author: Valerie Tripp

    Josefina’s personally

    Josefina is the youngest of four sisters, yet we see she is the peacemaker between her sisters.

    According to birth order personality theory, it is rare for the youngest to be the peacemaker. So it’s interesting that Josafina has taken this role on, apparently since the death of her mother.

    Josefina seams to struggle with anxiety about the goats. I’ve never had goats myself, but I’ve heard they can be bullies.

    Symbolism

    There are some great symbols in this book. The primrose has a number of meanings, I think the most relevant are childhood innocents, healing, and material love. That almost summarizes the whole book!

    Josafina is afraid of goats… but is she really? I’m no mental health professional,  but I do know that anxiety and hypervigilance are common reactions to trama. I think that Josafina is projecting her fears about the world onto the goats. The world is everywhere, an unmeasurable danger, but Josefina can know where the goats are, and while she can’t avoid the world, she can avoid some goats.

    We have reached the end of the American Girls I knew as a kid. Next we read the first girl released after I aged out of the series: Kit

  • American Girl Book Club

    American Girl Book Club

    I’m reading the American Girl books in the wrong order… join me!

    I am on a quest to “meet” every girl in the American Girl franchise. 14 of these young ladies invite us to meet them,

    For those of you who are new to the American Girl franchise or who only know the collectable doll line: American Girl used to be a franchise focused on telling stories about girls throughout American history. It did this through a series of books and dolls to ‘bring history to life’… hey, for a nine year old, dolls may as well be real life

    The series was created by Pleasent Company which released six girls. Two more girls, Kit and Kaya, were in pre-production when the brand was bought by Mattel in 1998. Kit and Kaya were released in the early 2000s, and Mattel has released several more girls over the years.
    So let me define exactly what I mean when I say I’m going to “Meet” the American Girls. I am going to read every book in the Historical Characters lineup that kicks off a book series for the girl and has the title “Meet ___” so while there is the Girls of Today line and other Historical Characters I will not be covering, I will still be reading 14 characters!

    I will also be reading them in release order to get an idea of how the brand changed overtime.

    First up is Meet Samantha.