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Saturday, February 16, 2019

Review: A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-1832 by Joan W. Blos


The journal of a 14-year-old girl, kept the last year she lived on the family farm, records daily events in her small New Hampshire town, her father's remarriage, and the death of her best friend.

 Hardcover, 144 pages
Published September 1st 1979
by Atheneum Books for Young Readers
**


This is the 1980 John Newbery Medal Winner. It’s a short little book coming in at 144 pages written in diary/journal style.  It spans about 15 months in the life of Catherine Hall.   There are many changes and heartbreak that she goes through and while some of the entries are short other ones are longer at times I got a sense of her frame of mind as she deals with everything.

This wasn’t a book that kept me glued to the pages, for a Medal Winner my expectations might have been elevated but this one fell flat for me. I didn’t connect with Catharine and a month after finishing it I struggle to remember all but a few pieces. The time period of 1830-1832 sees much happening in that area and I would have loved to see more.

My copy from personal library and part of my 2019 reading my shelf challenge as well as Project Newbery (reading all the John Newbery Medal winners )

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