A Gathering of Days

This is Wikipedia's entire article on this book, verbatim, at this moment: "A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal is a historical novel by Joan Blos that won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1980. It tells of a girl's days as a Quaker during the Revolutionary War." Two sentences, the second of which, I can vouch, is entirely inaccurate, as the girl is not a Quaker, and the timeframe is 1830-1832, as can be seen at the bottom of the image above. This should give you a rough idea of this book's importance and significance; its Wikipedia article is two sentences long and 50% inaccurate. I'll proceed with a quick recap. This book was terrible. Uninteresting and totally non-immersive, it just didn't impress me at all. It's set in Meredith, NH, a town I have been to several times, and I never once felt even a remote sense of connection or immersion with this pseudo-diary. The whole time, I couldn't help but wonder what the point was. Right off the bat, the narrator tells us that the diary covers the year when her father remarried and her best friend died. These are the only two moments throughout the book where I even felt like anything at all was happening, but they had been spoiled by the author from the get-go. The book I most readily compare this one to is Thomas Bailey Aldrich's A Story of a Bad Boy, which astute readers of Back-Blogged will recall was something I read a few weeks ago. That book was set around 1850 in Portsmouth, NH, and was also about a young person growing up and dealing with death, loss, and other generic things that happen to youngsters. Both were even intended for children. Yet, for whatever reason, Aldrich's tale was so much more interesting and engaging than Blos's. I suppose what bothered me most was that while reading Blos's book, I expected... something. It's a Newbery winner, after all. Having found nothing to rave about whatsoever in either this book or the previous Newbery winner I read, The Midwife's Apprentice, I'm starting to get really bummed that I decided to take on all of these books I found under my bed. Oh well. They're short, if not sweet, and each one brings me one book closer to completing my mission. But yeah, never read this book. It didn't do a single thing for me, a grown man reading children's books and blasting them on his unread blog.