Shopping etc.

A splendid day! We went shopping, and I got a spiffy red jacket - we had lunch at the Greek place, and I attempted to suss out the secret to their amazing lentil soup, but alas, it remains a little beyond me. (I do have an slightly-less-amazing-but-still-very-tasty lentil soup recipe, though. I should post it when I'm back at school and have access to the recipe.)

And then we went to Whole Foods and I ate all the things. They had some amazing gingerbread samples out, so I got two of my friends gingerbread for Christmas. Food for Christmas, it's a thing, right?

***

I also finished reading the Kaya books. I first tried to read the Kaya books when I was fourteen or fifteen, when they first came out. I didn’t make it very far, being too old for the writing style and too young to overcome it through indulgent nostalgia; and anyway, the first Kaya book is not very good. It's more a series of vignettes than one connected story.

The second book, though, the second book! The story really takes off in the second book. Kaya and Speaking Rain, her blind adoptive sister, get kidnapped by another tribe during a raid! Kaya escapes, but she has to leave Speaking Rain behind! And also her horse! But in a later book, she finds Speaking Rain again! But Speaking Rain had escaped, nearly perished, been found by a Salish woman who saved her life, and therefore pledged to remain with the Salish woman forevermore! So Kaya has found her sister, only to lose her again!!!!!!!!!

You can already see me eating this up with a spoon.

(And don't worry, they figure out a way that Speaking Rain can keep her vow - everyone takes this vow totally seriously, even though Speaking Rain is like eight - and also spend some time with Kaya and her tribe. They also find the horse. And Kaya inherits a name. Oh, and she gets a puppy!)

So, yeah. The Kaya books? Loads of fun. For all that the author is not Nez Perce - given that American Girl carefully got an African American author for the Addy books and a Jewish author for the Rebecca books, I don't know why they didn't do that here - American Girl did get the Nez Perce tribe involved in the process of putting these books together, and the author clearly did loads of research, so they are at least a good jumping off point.

I can't recall that I've read any books about Native Americans pre-contact with white settlers before (Do such children's books not exist? Did I just not look for them as a child? Either is possible), so they're interesting for that reason too: it's a very different past than most of the other historical fiction books explore. Both the Dear America books with Native American protags were post-contact, I think, and one was actually in a boarding school...

OH. Speaking of Dear America. The series was so popular that there are apparently related series all across the Anglophone world - Dear Canada, My Story (for the UK), My Australian Story...

I'm so curious about these! If only I'd known, I could have picked some up when I was in Britain for study abroad, or in Australia when I was 17. There's a blitzkrieg story! And a suffragette's story! And a Spanish lady-in-waiting of Catherine of Aragon story! Also inexplicably a Roman girl in ancient Pompeii (either she gets away before the volcano blows, or most depressing diary ever).

But. I have my American Girl project. I am not going to be swayed from my purpose by books that aren't even available to me anyway!