Customer Reviews

The Mayflower Adventure (The American Adventure Series #1)

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The American Adventure series is a great way to teach history to your kids in an exciting way! We use the series as part of our history lessons while we home school our six kids. The series shows history from a Christian view piont.

This is the first of The American Adventure series, a series of books about everyday life during important times from the crossing of the Mayflower, to the end of World War II.
This book is about John & Sarah Smythe, and their trip to the New World in the Mayflower. They face dangers like Disease, Storms, Drowning, and Indians. It also shows how helpful Squanto was in keeping the Pilgrims alive. This one wasn't as good as some of the others in the series, because they spent the entire time on the boat, but it was still good. If you are going to read the series, I suggest you start with this one.

If you like adventures, here's a book for you!It's about a family that moved from Holland to America. They faced storms, sadness, and sickness at sea, and then they finally land in America. I liked the main charcter, a boy named John, who faced many trials and was very brave.

This is the first book in my one of my favorite series. These books played an important role in developing my interest in history, American history in particular. Actually, most of my American history textbooks would make little sense if it weren't for my memories of these books. They are interesting, entertaining and have strong positive messages. I've always enjoyed the way the authors followed one family through America's history, and it encouraged my interest in genealogy.

If you ask most people, young or old, what they know about the Pilgrims, they'll be able to spit back a couple basic pieces of information. They came over on the Mayflower. They celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Indians after a hard winter. They came over to the New World for religious freedom. They wore a dour people and wore drab clothing in black, brown, and white. The last is not true. Do an online search for Pilgrims and clothing, and it's easy to find the truth that they wore many bright colors. This is known because when people died inventories were made of their estates, mentioning things like violet waistcoats, sky blue coats, and red petticoats. But, this book perpetuates the myth. On page 31, "Sarah looked enviously at Gretchen's bright blue dress. Unlike Sarah's people, Dutch children dressed in beautiful colors, and Sarah sometimes wondered what it would be like to wear something other than drab browns and blacks."

This is one of the major things that children will remember, and it's the popular belief. And it's completely wrong. If the author didn't bother to do basic research of Pilgrim clothing, then there's no reason to think she did with other items. The whole point of this book is to help expand children's knowledge of the Pilgrims; if it's not accurate, why bother?

Also, I didn't like one moral lesson taught. All throughout the book the 12-year-old son is getting in trouble for spying. It's important to remember that eavesdropping, listening to other people's conversation without their knowledge, was considered sinful and horribly ill-mannered. At the end, John wants to be in the room when the men are discussing where to settle their colony. The men say no and send him away, but he sneaks in and hides away. Afterwards, he learns that Father knew he was there, and is glad that he eavesdropped just this once because he witnessed the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Horrible lesson! Father could have invited him to stay, but didn't. After constantly chastising him for eavesdropping all throughout the book, to then say "I'm glad you disobeyed this time for no better reason than curiosity (i.e. no one in danger, etc)," sends a bad message.

Even apart from these two issues, the writing of the book was decent, but not outstanding.

Because of the major historical inaccuracy on a basic point, I cannot recommend this book as being accurate in its portrayal of the Pilgrims. If looking for a supplementary book on the Pilgrims, I would recommend instead Eating the Plates: A Pilgrim Book of Food and Manners. It had a lot of interesting information about the Pilgrims' everyday lives.