Another Time, Another Love by Vivian Schurfranz (with some American Girl nostalgia)

In my quest for easy, fun reads, I've of course tried out romance novels. I found this one in the YA section at my library. I was drawn to is because of the cover - duh, historical fiction for the win. I grabbed it and checked it out and started reading it today before it really set in that this is one of those lame time-traveling romance novels. The main character isn't even from the Revolutionary War - she's some inane Mary Sue with a penchant for stirrup leggings and saying "mustn't." I mean, okay, I'll give the author some slack on the clothing choices (the book was written in 1995), but it's the fact that these are always discussed in such excruciating detail that bugs me. I don't care when you write a book - in a few years some of that stuff is going to be horrifically dated and it's going to take a reader out of the story. This book was so overbearing about it I didn't even get a chance to get into the story in the first place. All I really cared about was the Revolutionary War stuff, honestly. Maybe this is a good book if you like The Patriot fan-fiction in book form with the convenient time-traveling mechanism so you can still have high school and mid-90s fashion trauma. 

So, after becoming exasperated with all of Cathy's (that's the Mary Sue) whining about her boyfriend who spends all his time volunteering at a literacy center and not taking her to Olive Garden, I skipped ahead through the book to find the historical fun that surely must ensue (based on the cover, anyway). Um, well, it gets worse - Cathy just goes back in time for little bits. A ball here, some tea parties there. I never got into it enough to figure out how exactly she travels back to the 1770s with her hottie ghost friend Edward (who's British and has a sexy accent, natch). 

    

You know what would be ideal for me? Grown-up American Girl books. Especially Felicity. She and Ben the apprentice should totally hook up. I tried to find some fan fiction a while ago in this vein - unfortunately it was fan fiction, so I couldn't stand it. 

It's because of the American Girl books that I'm kind of obsessed with colonial and Revolutionary War-era America anyway - the only real reason I picked up this Schurfranz novel in the first place. In-between 2nd and 3rd grade I would read all the books in a character's series in one day. I remember sitting on my bed for hours, chain-reading the Addy and Felicity and Molly books. But not Samantha, because she was rich and boring - and all my friends had prissy, frilly Samantha dolls, which didn't really go well with my fairly rustic Felicity Scenes & Settings. And none of them knew what stays were or what side-saddle meant, or how to politely refuse tea in case they were protesting taxation without representation. All the Samantha Parkington girls knew were the various ways to create calling cards and what it was like to read in an automobile. Pffft. (Oh, and how to rescue orphans and how to teach people to read. But ... yeah.)

I dunno, I might even break out my little boxed set of Felicity this summer. I'm pretty sure they aren't as spectacular as I remember (especially with only 75 words on a page), but still. 

Nostalgia beats time-traveling Mary-Sues any day.