Ranking all 13 'I Am Canada' Books

Overall thoughts

Let me get something out of the way:

I didn’t want to read these books.

Maybe that’s too strong of a statement. I’m something of a purveyor of children’s historical fiction. Previously, I fulfilled an insatiable decade-old desire lodged in the back of my brain to read and rank all 33 Dear Canada books, and determined that some of them are fantastic. Then, I set my sights a little further south and read and ranked all 43 Dear America books with slightly less exciting results. Then, I was supposed to read and rank The Royal Diaries—which is Dear Canada/America for kids who haven't developed class consciousness yet or, are really into Elizabeth Tudor/Cleopatra/Anastasia Romanova—and then I didn’t. It wasn’t for lack of resources, all of the books were at my local library. Instead, I fell into a reading slump last summer that I’m still crawling my way out of. My chance to include a Royal Diaries installment of this series vanished right before my eyes.

Currently, I have limited library access (ebooks and audiobooks only) and could not find ebooks of The Royal Diaries when I decided to do this ranking*. However, due to self-isolation, I still wanted rank something. Hence, I Am Canada. Even when I was the target age for this series, I never got into them. Partly because I had a hard time relating to boy protagonists, and partly because Scholastic Canada thinks that boys can only like historical fiction if there’s excess blood, guts, and emotional repression. I’m fine with blood and guts, and, as a gay person whose favourite movie is Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright, I’m no stranger to repression. But, it irks me that western society is conditioned to teach boys only the history that applies to them, to hand them a legacy of military conflict, imperialism, and hopeless violence, and say that it is the only history worth telling. We don’t need to make history BRUTAL and HARDCORE to make it exciting, or even worth caring about. This is a pitfall these books, unfortunately, fall into.

If I had to choose a boy series to read, I would have chosen My Name is America. The subject matter is more varied (Alaskan whalers! The Donner Party! The Newsboy Strike of 1899!) and they're more diverse (5 books out of 19 have nonwhite protagonists, which isn’t great but is better than I Am Canada’s one whole person of colour). Unfortunately, I couldn't find ebooks of several and am not desperate enough to buy the entire series off Amazon only to resell them. Yet.

So, all this leads up to my ranking of I Am Canada. Overall, I found the quality to be lacking both in terms of writing and topics. 13 books total and only three of them aren't about a battle or war. Of the 10 books that deal with war, half of them are about World War II. This is a disappointing choice, especially considering than less than half of My Name is America’s books deal with war and, only two are about World War II. Also, excluding, Alone in an Untamed Land, which is about Les Filles de Roi, none of Dear Canada’s topics are gender-specific. Topics like the influenza epidemic, the gold rush, or the Halifax explosion are engaging regardless of gender. And, of Dear Canada’s 33 books, 7 of the narrators are people of colour, three of them are Jewish, at least 4 experience PTSD, discussed in a semi-explicit manner, and one is disabled. These numbers could be higher, but compared to I Am Canada’s one nonwhite protagonist and 12 other white, vaguely Christian, mostly able-bodied, vaguely traumatized lineup, they’re downright astronomical.

Also, despite being about Canadian history, the majority of these books don’t even take place in Canada. This is another side effect of setting so many during World Wars. Anyway, all that was to say that my expectations going in were not high but I suppose they were met. So, on with the ranking.

(*I have since located The Royal Diaries ebooks so, stay tuned for that in a few months)

The Ranking

13. Brothers in Arms: The Siege of Louisbourg, Sébastien de L’Espérance, New France, 1758 by Don Aker (2015)

Excruciating boredom. That’s all there is to it. This book is dryer than a mouthful of sawdust. Every five or so pages, Sébastien has a spiel along the lines of “war is Hell but I must fight the British. I must avenge my best friend, but if I kill I am as bad as the enemy...it is my duty to defend Louisbourg...for my fiancée”. He brought up his fiancée, Marie-Claire so many times if you drank every time you see her name, you’d be dead by the first chapter. It doesn’t help that we know nothing about Marie-Claire or even Sébastien beyond the fact that they’re both Nice™. Additionally, the prose manages to be both too simple and too dense; and, by not showing Louisbourg as a home and a community before presenting it as a warzone, the reader never quite understands the stakes of the siege.

12. Sink and Destroy: The Battle of the Atlantic, Bill O’Connell, North Atlantic, 1940 by Edward Kay (2014)

It’s almost impressive how much I zoned out reading this. But, in my defense, I didn’t miss a lot. Descriptions comprise the majority of Sink and Destroy’s pages. Endless supplementary explanations of every ship, gun, plane, military tactic, and piece of jargon Bill encounters. If you stripped away the info-dumping there'd be little story left. The plot, Bill’s character development, and his personality get lost amidst info-dumping. The same goes for the emotional climax of the story: Bill goes to visit his girlfriend only to discover that she and her entire family died in the Blitz. By the time the book ends, Bill has lost the first girl he loved, her letters to him, his best friend in the Navy, and the town where his family lived for over a century, and you’re left wondering ‘for what’? What's there under all that terminology that makes the endless description of frozen vomit and outdated guns worth it?

11. A Call to Battle: War of 1812, Alexander MacKay, Upper Canada, 1812 by Gillian Chan (2012)

Damn, the War of 1812 really is not it for Scholastic Canada, huh? The first line of my notes says “not to be rude but Sandy kind of sucks” which is rude even when the person in question is fictional. But, I maintain that he does kind of suck! He has this relentless ‘put me in coach’ vibe with a chip the size of Hudson Bay on his shoulder, and cannot go more than a few pages without referencing how Big and Strong he is. I felt like I was on a rush-hour train and he was standing two inches from my face yammering on about how he had to go to War to Achieve Glory and Kill Yankees because... masculine glory, I guess. Shut up, Sandy.

10. Storm the Fortress: The Siege of Quebec, William Jenkins, New France, 1759 by Maxine Trottier (2013)

Caveat that this book is technically “not good” if you’re a buzzkill, but by god is it entertaining. Three characters came back from the dead, there is somehow too much and not enough detail, nothing bears any emotional weight, and yet... I had a blast. The High Melodrama (Sub)plot is a time-honoured tradition in these reviews—see Jean Little’s Dear Canada books, see 90% of the plots in the relaunched Dear America books—and I’m glad we’ve returned to our bonkers roots. It actually swung around from being badly-crafted to an Absolute Masterpiece. Plus, it’s endearing how Maxine Trottier wrote one of my top 5 Dear Canada books (The Death of My Country, also about the Plains of Abraham from the POV of an Abenaki girl) then went on to write this. She has the range.

9. Behind Enemy Lines: World War II, Sam Frederiksen, Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1944 by Carol Matas (2012)

Upon first glance, I assumed this would be like my beloved Code Name Verity (which I have written about and recommended several read-a-likes here): an allied pilot went down in occupied France and must rely on the resistance to survive. And on first glance, it was. There wasn’t quite enough Intrigue and Action to keep me hooked, but that was okay. And then it became clear that Behind Enemy Lines is not actually about working with the French resistance but about a POW camp. Which would be fine, but there are several other books in the series about POW camps. It isn’t new, and I would have enjoyed it more if Sam’s friend, Max, who is Jewish, had narrated because there would have been higher stakes. Also, Sam is a flimsy narrator. That’s a recurring problem with these books, the narrators are mostly duds. However, I did appreciate some much-needed representation in the form of another prisoner, James, who has almost all of Hamlet memorised and quotes sections at will.

8. Fire in the Sky: World War I, Paul Townend, Over No Man’s Land, 1916 by David Ward (2013)

In the historical note, David Ward notes that the life expectancy for a Canadian pilot was 2-3 weeks. Historian J.L. Granatstein states that a pilot could last about 10 weeks, and about a quarter of Canada’s entire airforce died in combat or training. Nelson Wyatt, writing for the Canadian Press, says that new pilots in 1916-17 called themselves The 20-Minute Club, for that was how long they could expect to survive in combat. With this in mind, one could be forgiven for expecting Fire in the Sky to be tense and urgent, bring to life the fear young pilots, even well-trained ones such as Paul would have felt, and debunk the rockstar lifestyle of the flying ace. Instead, it fails its readers by stretching the timeline over two years, draining it of excitement and danger. And, while there were a few cases of interesting prose, it never convinced me of the constant danger pilots were in. The timeline problem is the most consistent thing about these books, this is neither the first nor last case of it.

7. Deadly Voyage: RMS Titanic, Jamie Laidlaw, April 14, 1912 by Hugh Brewster (2011)

Another book with unfair competition. If you read my Dear Canada ranking—if you didn’t, how on earth did you wind up here?—then you’ll know that Sarah Ellis’ Titanic book was my favourite. It haunted me for days after finishing. And it’s very hard for poor Jamie to measure up to Dorothy from That Fatal Night. Dorothy gets expelled after punching a student who made a wisecrack about the disaster, processes her trauma by writing plays about capitalism’s need for progress at the expense of human lives, and spends most of the book believing she's alive only because she committed manslaughter. Jamie’s fun and believable, but he’s naught more than a rascal whose narration is surprisingly nonchalant for someone who has to dive off a sinking ship into freezing water, not knowing if he or any of his family and friends will survive. When you get down to it, Deadly Voyage is just another Titanic book.

6. Graves of Ice: The Lost Franklin Expedition, George Chambers, The Northwest Passage, 1845 by John Wilson (2014)

If you’ve had the misfortune of talking to me within the past year, then you’re possibly aware that in July I read The Terror by Dan Simmons (awful on several counts, offensive, a full-on Monet), then I watched the adaptation of it by AMC (breathtaking, showstopping, masterful television), then I fell headfirst down a polar exploration rabbit hole. My point is that I’m easily pleased by Franklin-related fiction but there will be still competition. Graves of Ice’s biggest sin is that it isn’t my beloved favourite TV show. Its second biggest sin is the overstuffed plot and slow pacing. The attempts to include George’s pre-Expedition life and 3+ years of gruelling Arctic hell fall flat. But, it’s still leagues above Dan Simmons’ writing so I can’t fault it too much. Slide into my DMs if you’re interested in how I personally would restructure the plot to make sense.

5. Prisoner of Dieppe: World War II, Alistair Morrison, Occupied France, 1942 by Hugh Brewster (2011)

I don’t know why Scholastic decided multiple books about POW camps were necessary. I mean, I understand why a book about Dieppe exists. It's important to learn about both victories and defeats when studying history, and the Canadians at Dieppe were imprisoned for a long time. But, if they wanted a book about an important Canadian WWII moment in Normandy….Juno Beach and D-Day were right there. The first third is a lot of nothing, the middle is a bit exciting, and the last chunk glazes over years and years of prison camp like icing on a timbit. Also, I believe in media transparency, so when I say that the most notable part of this book is the shocking similarities it bears to, like, 80% of canon-compliant Captain America fanfic, I am saying with the knowledge of someone who has read literally millions of words of Captain America fanfic. I lost my wallet at TCAF 2017 because I was buying Captain America: The Winter Soldier fanart and put it (my wallet) on a shelf trying to rearrange the contents of my backpack to fit it (the fanart). I have to live with this knowledge and now so do you.

4. Sniper Fire: The Fight for Ortona, Paul Baldassara, Italy, 1943 by Jonathan Webb (2016)

According to my notes, I gave this an impressive 8/10 and liked it a lot. But now that I’m sitting down to talk about it, I cannot tell you a single plot point. In fact, I keep forgetting about it entirely. I kept counting the books I’ve read to see which ones I was missing and every single time I forgot this one, which apparently was one of my favourites. This is more a comment on the Swiss cheese-esque nature of my brain than the book. Sniper Fire did everything one of these books should, it highlighted a little-covered aspect of a famous historical period from the perspective of a narrator who we wouldn’t normally hear from with a lot of empathy toward the human cost of combat. And it had a melancholy Christmas chapter which is one of my favourite media tropes. Unfortunately, my brain refuses to accept that this book exists. Sorry, Paul.

3. Blood and Iron: Building the Railway, Lee Heen-gwong, British Columbia, 1882 by Paul Yee (2010)

One of the things that caught me off-guard when starting these books, is that they are not diaries. Dear Canada and Dear America are both diary series. But I guess diary-keeping isn’t Manly and Hardcore enough. Discounting, of course, that famous men throughout history kept diaries instead of tweeting. Also, the American version of the series, My Name is America uses diaries format so I cannot understand why these don’t. The diary format makes for strong interior storytelling and character arcs rather than a deluge of dull martial facts. My point being that Blood and Iron is in fact a diary and when I realised this I nearly cried on the metro. It gets points for format, points for a likable narrator, points for making me care about trains, and bonus cool points because it takes place in the same year and place as its feminine counterpart, A Ribbon of Shining Steel! Points docked because once Heen starts work on the railway, it gets a bit predictable.

2. Defend or Die: The Siege of Hong Kong, Jack Finnigan, Hong Kong, 1941 by Gillian Chan (2015)

Finally, a genuinely engaging book! And from Gillian Chan, of all people! I’ve been complaining about the monotony of books set in POW camps and Defend or Die avoids this by employing a classic [record scratch] [freeze frame] ‘yep, that’s me…’ opening. It flips between Jack’s attempts at survival in prison, and his involvement in Hong Kong up until his capture. The dual-timelines keep you on your toes, Jack is three-dimensional as opposed to just being there to narrate, and there’s interesting motivation all around! My only word of warning is that it’s heavy on the gore which will appeal to preteen boys and weird little girls but may deter anyone with a weak stomach. Also, I'm disappointed that we never got the backstory about Jack's girlfriend, Alice. The whole reason he goes to war is that it was a better option than staying in prison after he beat up his girlfriend's brother. I want the lore on this relationship!

1. Shot at Dawn: World War I, Allan McBride, France, 1917 by John Wilson (2011)

Ballsy as hell for the second book in this series to be about an 18-year-old telling his story before he gets executed for desertion. He lives, obviously, but this is the gravitas and gut-wrenching storytelling I was missing with these books. Allan begins the war a young Romantic and born dreamer who thinks combat will give him an opportunity to bond with an admired older friend and see the world. In return for his service, he gets his life shredded up and handed back to him in pieces. It's an excellently written examination of the masculinity crisis and the pitfalls of romanticising war. If any of these books find their way to the hands of preteen boys, I hope it's this one. A few weeks after finishing, I went out and bought a volume of Wilfred Owen’s poems. The old lie dulce et decorum est pro patria mori indeed.

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading! If you know where I can find ebook versions of the three My Name is America books I'm missing, or if you have a ranking request (anyone remember Chasing Vermeer? I just found out that it's a series. Who else was obsessed with The Name of this Book is Secret? Will A Series of Unfortunate Events be just as great if I read it for the first time as an adult?) hit me up on twitter. Scholastic Canada I know you're reading this, please let me revive your diary fiction empire I have, like, so many ideas.