The diaries also have a darker side, as a sense of impending doom builds as the entries approach 9/11, especially because Alyssa’s father works in finance in the World Trade Center. Alyssa is endlessly earnest and awkward as she works up the courage to talk to her crush, Alejandro gushes about her dreams of becoming a shoe designer and tries to solve her burgeoning unibrow problem. She’s shuffling between Queens and Manhattan to share time between her divorced parents and struggling with thick facial hair and classmates who make her feel like she’s “not a whole person” due to her mixed White and Puerto Rican heritage. She’s 11 and dealing with typical preteen concerns-popularity and anxiety about grades-along with other things more particular to her own life. Through the author’s own childhood diary entries, a seventh grader details her inner life before and after 9/11.Īlyssa’s diary entries start in September 2000, in the first week of her seventh grade year. Trina Schart Hyman applies her confectioner's touch to the dandified goings on, and her caricatures of Hancock-looking appropriately pompous, outraged, or chagrined-catch the mood of affectionate iconoclasm.
Later Hancock, who had aspired to be Commander-in-Chief, retires his "slender constitution" from the military after one disastrous battle to apply himself to the heroic task of entertaining volunteer French officers. The most vulnerable, and humanizing, aspect of Hancock was clearly his overweening vanity, and Fritz plays the characteristic from every angle-an inventory of Hancock's nine fancy carriages comparison of his increasingly grandiose signatures even Hancock's own description of having to "Ruff it" during the war by doing without a candle snuffer and dining on tough turkey. Unlike Ben Franklin (see above) who can't be pigeonholed, John Hancock is a pushover for the Fritz method. Jean Fritz goes rolling along, and we merrily after, through yet another fizzy tribute to our Founding Fathers.
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