Customer Reviews

When Will This Cruel War Be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson, Gordonsville, Virginia, 1864 (Dear America Series)

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Born into a wealthy Southern plantation family, Emma Simpson had every luxury she desired.... until the outbreak of the Civil War. Her father, brother, uncle, and the young man she loves go off to war - her brother and uncle to die early on. But the hardships are not limited to the battlefield - they reach out to touch Emma's sheltered, quiet home in ways she never imagined possible. There are rumors that the slaves she thought faithful to her family plan to run away. Deserters from both sides raid the farm, stealing the food Emma, her mother, and her aunt and cousin, who have come to stay for the remainder of the war, need in order to survive. And when her already frail mother becomes desperatley ill, and soon dies, Emma has only her aunt and cousin to turn to. But things become even worse when Yankees invade the peaceful countryside and take over Emma's house to use as headquarters. Confined to an upstairs room, Emma has now lost the one thing left of her life before the war. But she is determined to never give up and wait for the day her father and sweetheart will return home to her. I highly reccomend this book. It showed how the Southern families lives' were torn apart by the Civil War and how a lot of them practiced slavery simply because it was what their families had been doing for generations and they knew no other way of life.

I have been reading a book called When Will This Cruel War be Over? The Civil War diary of Emma Simpson by Barry Denenberg. This book is a diary of a little girl named Emma Simpson who is living through the Civil War. She writes all of her thoughts, hopes and dreams in her diary. She has a very hard life during the civil war. Her father, brother and uncle have all gone to in to the war to fight the Yankees/Negroes. At the beginning of the book her family and she found out that her brother/Brother Cole has just been killed. Her aunt and cousins come out to take care of her and her mother. A little bit later in the book her mother dies. So her father writes her and tell her everything is going to be OK. After a few chapters the Yankees make Emma, her aunt, and her cousins live on the 3rd floor so the Yankees can use their house as a hospital. Emma helps out but wishes they will just leave her family alone. When they do finally leave they trash the house. The only room on the 1st floor that isn’t trash in the library because that is where the general’s office was. Emma has gone through a lot but she goes through a lot more. When the war is over Emma and her family has gone through a lot of pain. (...) This is the war that a few days after President Abraham Lincoln got killed.
This is a very historical book. I would recommend this book to 7th and 8th graders across the USA and in other countries too. If you don’t like books that are about wars or suffering then I wouldn’t recommend this book. I liked this book.

I read a book en-titled, When Will This Cruel War Be Over? A diary of Emma Simpson. This is a very good book. You learn alot of interesting facts about the Civil War.It is about a girl named Emma Simpson and her and her family get attacked by the Yankees. They have to move all of their stuff up to the top floor. When the Yankees invade their house, they eat all of their food, take all of their stuff and burn and ruin all of their furniture. I like how the author has most of his characters have a dialect, each character has his or hers own personality. This book is an A+, 100%book! You must read this book.

When Will This Cruel War Be Over (The Civil War) / 0-590-22862-5

Quite frankly, this book is terrible and fails on many levels. Historically, it is useless, because it subverts real and important history in favor of overt racism. A single glaring example: on page 29 of the diary, the narrator describes the "weekly classes" that her mother gives to their slave children or, as she terms, "her little scholars". In a book set in 1864, in Virginia, in the midst of the Civil War, the plantation family is giving weekly lessons to their slave children to read and write! This is terrible history - teaching reading and writing to a slave was a dire offense in the South, thanks to the Slave Codes and Anti-Literacy laws, most of which originated in Virginia a century before this book is set! Teaching a single slave to be your personal bookkeeper was a serious offense; holding public lessons for all your slave children would result in the entire family being burnt out of town for being abolitionists or worse! Historically, any master intent on giving slaves lessons would have done so in the direst secrecy, in the dead of night, and only to adults (little children might let slip the secret). Such a master would sleep with a loaded gun by the bed, conscious that the slightest slip of tongue could result in a riot, in hangings, in the death and destruction of everything they owned.

Why does the author thumb his nose at history and insert this ludicrous detail, despite the incredible breach of accuracy? Two reasons, really. First, he can continue to paint the Southern plantation owners as paternalistic participants in the "fair and equitable" system of slavery. It's horrifying to see that the "slavery was good for black people because their masters took care of them" argument is still alive and well here. Second, our author can flaunt his racism by underscoring his idea that slaves were simple minded idiots who actually *needed* the structures of slavery in order to survive - the narrator notes with matronly frustration that the slave children simply do not *want* to learn to read and write and are stupid little barbaric animals, uninterested in the larger world around them.

Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, halfway through the book I started turning down the page corner every time a slave did something stupid, dim-witted, animalistic, or sub-human. I had to stop this practice, however, because I realized I was turning down every single page. It's not just that the narrator is "realistically racist", the slave actions that the author imagines for his fictional Emma to record are caricatures of people - his slaves are stupid, dim animals who are too foolish to appreciate freedom, literacy, or the simple privilege of having a family. By contrast, the fictional plantation owners are sweet and gentle masters who deserve lionization - although we just have to believe this when it is presented as fact, for we are given no examples of praiseworthy actions to back this up. He lavishes praise on them for not beating the slaves too often unless they are particularly stubborn or stupid, and for not breaking up families unless "necessary".

As much as the author cannot capture a realistic black slave in his writing, he cannot capture a realistic young woman. "Emma" is boring and tiresome. She simply does not do anything in this novel except write letters to a boy she has met only once, expound on the virtues of marriage to her diary, and sit by her ailing mother. We're well into the Civil War, with full-fledged shortages and starvation - you'd think we might see Emma in the fields, desperately trying to eke out a carrot or two from the barren fields, or we might see her at the market, haggling for a bit of bacon to feed to her ill mother, but these interesting scenes of shortages and famine don't seem to occur to the author. There is marriage to write about!

Emma's fictional "Cousin Rachel" (Emma is too stupid to realize that when you only know one Rachel, you don't have to keep writing "Cousin Rachel" every time) takes up at least a third of the book with her arguments against marriage, and Emma is obsessed with pointing out that Rachel is wrong. At first, this seems potentially intriguing - Has Rachel been jilted? Wronged? Has a secret and youthful lover died in an earlier battle? Has her father shamelessly abandoned her mother? - It isn't until the epilogue that it is revealed that, no, Rachel was just insane. That's why she professed relatively sensible concerns about 19th century marriage: insanity. I honestly cannot tell if the author is a misogynist or just boring and unimaginative.

I would not recommend this novel to anyone. Apart from the pro-slavery racism and paternalistic attitudes, apart from the anti-feminism and slavishly romantic main character, apart from the painful boredom of a young woman who never does anything with her life except mope around waiting for a boy she met once to ride up and rescue her, the entire affair was so boring from beginning to end that even "Emma" seems to realize how deathly dull her life is - many pages of her diary have a mere single sentence as an entry. In closing, I will leave you with these riveting examples of the evocative writing in this diary, with each entry produced in its entirety:

Wednesday, January 13, 1864 - I never realized how happy I was until this war besieged our land.
Tuesday, February 16, 1864 - There are many reports of smallpox in the area.
Tuesday, February 23, 1864 - Mother remained in bed all day.
Wednesday, March 23, 1864 - Mother is still feeling poorly.
Monday, April 18, 1864 - Mother died today.
Tuesday, May 10, 1864 - We received word of the death of Lieutenant Walker.
Tuesday, May 24, 1864 - Cousin Rachel and I talked in my room again this evening.
Saturday, July 9, 1864 - My watch is broken.
Sunday, July 24, 1864 - The weather is quite warm today.
Saturday, December 3, 1864 - We wait in breathless anticipation for news.
Sunday, December 11, 1864 - How long O Lord, how long?
Thursday, December 22, 1864 - I am growing thin and feeling weak. I can no longer even weep.

~ Ana Mardoll

The Civil War changed fourteen year old Emma Simpson's life forever. Her father and brother went to fight for the Confederacy, and Emma's brother dies in battle. Emma's world is torn apart as war rages at her doorstep. There are food shortages, and Union soldier occupy Emma's small hometown. Emma's mother gets ill and dies, and Emma wonders if life will ever be the same again. A touching, poignant book. Readers will relate to Emma, and the diary format enables the reader to know what its like to have your world torn apart while war rages at your doorstep... a must-read for any girl ages 8-13 who is interested in history. Also reccomended: Sally Bradford: The Story of a Rebel Girl by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, and Emma Eileen Grove, Mississippi, 1865 by Kathleen Duey.

In the book When Will this cruel war be over? Emma Simpson is suffering from the civil war she livies in gordonsville virginia and they have negros (as she says), her father is off at war and she and her mother and negros are at home her mother gets sick and dies. Later her aunt and 2 cousins come to live with them ,well little baby Elizabeth(her yongest cousin)dies of scarlet fever . She also developes a crush on a boy named Tally (he went to war to) but even though all these people die there's a happy ending,but to find out you'll have to read the book!

This book was not as good as other books in this series. It was the diary of Emma Simpson, a fictional 14 year old girl living on a plantation in Virginia during the Civil War. This book was supposed to sound like it was a young girl's diary, but it sounded like it was written by an adult.

THIS WAS THE FRIST DEAR AMERICA BOOK I EVER READ. I WAS UNSURE ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT I WOULD LIKE IT. BUT WHEN I STARTED READING IT I FELT LIKE I WAS ACTUALLY EMMA THE MAIN CHARACTER.THAT IS WHY I RATE IT 5 STAR. THE AUTHOR SEEMS TO DRAW YOU INTO THE BOOK MORE AND MORE.

The book is not that thick to begin with, and I think the author "padded" it to meet page count. There are many one-sentence entries. Example: "The weather is quite warm today." I also noticed that in certain parts, there are huge spaces between where one entry ends and the next begins -- as much as half a page. Also, the voice that narrarated the book was very stiff and formal. I don't know if all Southern aristocrats talked that way, but it bothered me. "I must confess that at times I simply wish Cousin Rachel would conduct herself in a more appealing fashion." Another thing I disliked was Emma's constant references to the books she was reading. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, etc. It was irritating because I'd never read those books and I don't intend to anytime soon. I do however give the book two stars because one rarely sees a Civil War story told from POV of the Southern gentry.

I love learning about the Civil War, and this book gives me a view point of a Confederate plantation owner's daughter.