If you read and loved the Dear America books as a tween in the late 90s/early 2000s, then this episode is for you! Author Ella Dawson joins host Emily Hessney Lynch for a fun conversation about everyone's favorite Dear America book, Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, by Ellen Emerson White, which came out in 1998.

We discuss what held up well in our reread, whether or not the book is historically accurate, how little details bring a story to life, publishers' depressing cost-cutting measures, how Dear America compares to the I Survived series, how much a first-class Titanic ticket would cost in 2026, and what current events would make great Dear America books today. You'll even learn where the idea of a passenger surviving the Titanic on a floating door comes from (spoiler alert: it wasn't a white person floating on the door!).

Links:

• We discuss several book covers in the episode. Here are the images for each of the Dear America: Titanic versions: 1998 original cover; 2010 reissue cover; 2026 reissue cover. We also discuss the I Survived covers, including the novel version and the graphic novel adaptation.
• Titanic Sinks Tonight is the BBC mini series Ella recommended.
• Listen to Ella's previous appearance on It's a Lot, "Capitalism Ruins Everything"
• Check out Ella's debut novel, But How Are You, Really in hardcover or ebook
• For more of Ella and her work, find her on Instagram or Patreon, and listen to her podcast Rebel Ever After
• Follow Emily on Instagram and check out her business, Serve Me the Sky Digital, if you need a social media strategist, speaker, or writer!

Books mentioned in the episode:

• Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady (Dear America) by Ellen Emerson White
• Marie Antoinette: Princess of Versailles, Austria-France, 1769 (The Royal Diaries) by Kathryn Lasky (please excuse the yaasified cover)
• I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912 by Lauren Tarshis
• I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912: A Graphic Novel by Lauren Tarshis, illustrated by Haus Haus Studio and adapted by Georgia Ball
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (recommended by Amanda, a children's librarian in Illinois, for those who enjoyed the epistolary format of Dear America). If what you loved is the immersive nature of Dear America, Amanda also recommends checking out more historical fiction as it can be richly detailed! And if you loved learning about different time periods, she recommends exploring more narrative nonfiction.
• The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower (recommended by Lauren, a youth librarian in Upstate NY). If you loved Dear America and the Royal Diaries books, she also recommends historical romance as it's deeply researched and focused on women's interests. Some of her favorite historical romance authors are Alexandra Vasti, Sarah MacLean, and Evie Dunmore. Lauren also notes that historical fiction by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Kristin Hannah are worth checking out too!
• Across the Living Infinite: A Queer Romance Aboard the RMS Titanic by Logan Sage Adams is out on April 15, 2026 and Ella is very much looking forward to reading it!

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The idea of being like, this is my 13 year old who's going to take care of my dresses on the Titanic is kind of like, wow, Yikes. Here's my orphan, my designer orphan.

Oh my God.

Hello, and welcome to It's A Lot, a podcast about things that are a lot.

This is when I would normally read a long introduction about nuance and empathy and all that good stuff. But today we're just going to talk about Dear America books. And I'm so excited to have a guest back on. Ella Dawson is here with me. Welcome, Ella.

Thank you for having me back.

I am so excited to talk about Dear America. We picked the Titanic book as our focus for tonight. What do you remember about the Dear America series?

I loved the Dear America series when I was a kid and I vacuumed them all up. They were all at the public library, so I'm pretty sure, and at the school library at my elementary school, so I'm pretty sure that my mom was not buying like 30 million hardcovers. But I was voracious. And my school also had like an after school program and my mom taught a Dear America, a book club after school class.

So she would. I don't know what the pace was for these kids reading the books, but she was very in the weeds about them as well.

And so we were a very Dear America household. So I was so excited when you had this idea because I had kind of forgotten about them.

I didn't realize they were even still around or maybe not still being published, but still available. And it turns out it's like a quintessential millennial memory for a lot of people.

We can jump ahead actually, in my little outline and talk about the covers because they are still coming out. There is one coming out. The Titanic is being reissued this October for some reason.

Weird coincidence.

Yeah. So what are your reactions to the original cover? Is this, like, exactly the vibe you remembered? Let's describe it for our viewers.

Yes, I remember it's a hardcover book with a very, like, soft cover. Even though it's hard, like, the texture, the page feels really good on the cover, it has that illustrated portrait of the main character at the center of the cover which makes it feel like even though this is historical fiction, it's a real girl that you're following. There's the lovely, like, historical script. The title is, in a script.

You have this really gorgeous thick frame, this color block frame around the edges. And for me, it always made me feel very fancy and sophisticated that I was reading those books.

And I remember there was Also the ribbon bookmark that was sewn into the spine. So it felt like a very luxurious, serious endeavor while still being really engrossing.

And so yeah, we were texting when we saw the new covers and we had very strong opinions and reactions.

Yeah. The other thing I would note about this, the old edition is they have those pages that you feel the texture on the edge. I don't know what they call that when it's like slightly different amounts that it's sticking out.

I don't know either. I should know that, but I don't.

Yeah, they actually discontinued the bookmarks. I don't know what year that was, but the version I got from my library does not have the bookmark. And the articles I was reading confirmed the bookmarks are no longer a thing. Sadly.

Yeah, I think they're an expensive added touch and I think what we're seeing this across publishing, but it's been like a decades long thing is books are.

Publishers are increasingly trying to focus on raising their margins and it's by cutting a lot of those little luxurious touches that were so memorable for us and made those books feel so special and collectible as well.

Yeah, it's such a bummer were all library copies and not ones that we owned.

Producer note: that kind of edge is called a deckle edge.

Oh, I feel like I've heard that!

Thank you.

Yeah, that is. Yeah. They're just very slightly different widths and that's that texture.

Yeah. Yeah. So the new cover of the Titanic book. I don't know if you want to click on the link in the Google Doc. This one is more.

It would be a good idea for me to open the Google Doc again. One moment.

It's like a teal cover. It still has a portrait in the middle. The girl is wearing yellow. Her face looks kind of retouched almost. It's a very different vibe compared to the original. You still see a ship in the background, but it almost doesn't look like the Titanic to me. It doesn't have like the iconic four funnels.

2010.

But it feels kind of that uncanny, like computer illustration. As opposed to like a fine art illustration. And it is like a very odd crop of a photo of the Titanic. It looks like it could be any ship.

You're only seeing like the front one of the. I don't know what the name is, but one of the wooden supports for the telegraph radio wire as opposed to the funnel. And yeah, it's weird. I don't like this design. This is ugly. It's sad.

The original cover that we were talking about before, I also wanted to mention at the age I was reading this, this girl in the portrait looks exactly like one of my best friends from when I was like 10 or 12 reading this. So that always was like eerie to me at the time.

She's moody, she's got vibes, she's really. I would follow her into a lifeboat for sure.

It's very strange. It's again, it's like an even more simplified left aligned filigree gold which like reminds me of the Scholastic books if I'm thinking of the right ones. Like it feels almost younger to me as opposed to like a serious middle grade book. It feels very like it just feels cheap.

There's a very aesthetic AI ish. Not AI generated, but AI ish portrait of a girl. But it's her torso up and she's kind of like she has her hands on her chest. She's looking wistful.

Her hair is blowing cinematically and it's like the starry night sky is behind her with the ocean. You see like two little lifeboats rowing away from the Titanic. You see the iceberg, which is funny.

It's like very much like this is a crisis as opposed to like what an elegant ship. And you see the Titanic half sunk. Oh, either it's bow or stern, I can't remember. Up in the air at a diagonal, like mid final plunge.

Like, this is a very. The Titanic is sinking. This is going to be a dramatic book. It does not feel like it has the gravitas of the original chapter. It feels very.

Feels cheap. My Connecticut snob comes out with stuff like this. I'm like, this is taking away from the seriousness of this tragedy.

But the smokestacks have like smoke pouring out of them, which I didn't notice before, but I feel like the smoke would have stopped by then.

Perhaps that's a historical inaccuracy.

Yeah, I think. Shame, shame.

Some titaniacs might come after me, but the engines had stopped at that point. They were no longer running.

And that was something that people on board in the accounts of survivors noted of like how quiet and still it felt and how they were like, oh, something's really wrong.

So I'll also jump ahead a little and note that I read two additional Titanic middle grade books before recording this. And I'll show you the covers. It might be easier if you pull them up, but this is I Survived, which is a series that is very popular, I've been told.

And it is. This one is the regular novel version. And there's like the Titanic sinking.

I think it's the stern in the air and there's like a boy looking at it and it almost looks like he's on like a lookout or something. It doesn't look like a lifeboat. The thing he's like sitting in, there's like a wooden railing in front of him.

It's hard to tell if he's supposed to be floating in the water or in a ship. Like we're seeing the very, very edge and just his back.

Yeah, it's very strange. And then they also have been adapting a lot of these I Survived books into graphic novels.

So the graphic novel version has like an even more dramatic cover where the boy is. He is. Both of the covers are not accurate to what happens in the story. The boy is being pulled into the lifeboat by someone else. And that's not what happens in the book! So.

And it's also showing very choppy waves when in reality it was like a very still night. Like it's just odd. Like you can see that historical accuracy going out the window.

So we'll talk about these books a little bit later if we want to. But I felt like those were even more dramatized than the original Dear America. Like they wanted to make them super action packed. I'm like, there's already enough happening. You don't need to lean into the melodrama.

This is one of the most best historically documented, if not the most historically documented event ever. It is a mass tragedy that everyone is familiar with. You really don't need to amp up the Titanic. Right.

There were topics like the Salem Witch Trials, slavery, the Gold Rush, Titanic, Great Depression, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, I think one thing that stands out to me when we look at the topics is like they did not shy away from heavy, dark topics. They're like, oh yeah, we're going for it. There's like a fire where a bunch of working women died. Let's. Let's write a whole book about it.

Yeah. The theme of a lot of the topics you mentioned was just women dying.

Yeah.

In some type of way. Like these are big time trauma. It's not like let's all gloat about beautiful American history. Which was honestly a wonderful antidote to the education I think I received a lot of kids received in school, which was kind of like rah rah America in that, at least in that elementary school period for sure.

One thing I didn't know until I was researching this episode is they adapted a bunch of these into HBO TV shows. Did you know that?

I did not know that. That is wild.

But weirdly enough, they didn't make a Titanic one.

Hmm. Maybe they didn't have the budget. That's weird that it was HBO and at that time, like that's just very.

It's not a kid friendly network. No.

I'm. I'm surprised. I'd be curious to watch those and see what the tone was like, because I don't think when I think HBO in that era, I think Sex and the City and the Soprano is like not children's and educational children's entertainment.

Right. And I didn't hear anything about them at the time either. You would think like other kids would be talking about them, but I don't know.

Yeah. I wonder if they're lost media now. We should. I will, I will do some illegal research.

Yeah. Let's see what we can find out. They ended up having 36 books in the series total.

I want to say that was one of the only ones, I think, that got a sequel. I did not know that Mary Pope Osborne, who wrote the Magic Treehouse books, wrote one of the Dear America books. So I'm kind of curious to go back and read hers possibly.

This must have been a sweet gig for a working author because it's kind of ip, but not really. I could see this being like a dream contract definitely.

And I was wondering if they. They must still get royalties on the rereleases like the one that's coming out this year. Again, you would think she's still getting paid, right?

That's a great question. It depends on the type of contract. Often with an IP project or an existing franchise, it's sometimes a flat fee. But I, I mean their names are on it.

It's not like they're unlisted ghostwriters. So I'm. It's a very good question. We'll slide into their DMs and be like, how are you getting paid?

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. And it is, I think it's notable that those are not America specific that it is. I'm guessing it was a play also for global readership and distribution.

I'd be curious if they were working with like international imprints, but we read the Marie Antoinette one and were less satisfied with our reading experience.

I think it suffered from a lot of these had to be like a one year time period when they were like 12, 13 years old. And that period in her life just was not that interesting. It was kind of sad and not a fun time to read. I mean, not like the Titanic's not sad.

but it was not propulsive. And there's a big difference in the mandate of these are fictional girls. But we're going to talk about real history and here's a real life person.

And like the Marie Antoinette one, I won't get into a whole tangent about it, but it's much harder to make a specific year of someone's life interesting when the year itself in their life was not that interesting. You're stuck with the facts.

One thing that did kill me about the Marie Antoinette one, which we did text about, was that the author in the end said if I wrote a fantasy novel about Marie Antoinette, I really would love to do that because I think she would just go, go to America instead of getting married and join the Revolutionary War.

Like man, girl, did you know anything about this woman? Like it really, it colored the authorial intent of the book for me. I was like, oh, this is a very.

That's not, it's like really fantasy to say that that would happen. That is not supported by what we know in the historical record.

Not a lot of like revolutionary vibes coming off of Marie Antoinette.

No.

I feel like I did, but it might be a false memory. I should have asked my mom, but we were struck by finding that there was a Donner Party one.

And the more that I've thought about it, the more I feel like I did read it because I was a morbid little kid. So I have a feeling I read it, but it's not something I remembered independently. I remembered the Dear America books, but not the my My Name Is America boys books at all.

I did get the Donner Party one from the library and started it the other day and from what I can tell it seems like they're going to cut off right before they start the cannibalism. So that's an interesting choice.

But when we asked our friends for reactions on Instagram, someone said yo, the Dear America book on Donner Party ruined my youth. So thank you, Justyn, for sharing that. I am excited to get to the end of the book and see what ways it is ruining.

I'm so curious and like there are a lot of ways in which the Donner Party is misremembered and there's like a mythic version of that story and there are some great like podcast episodes of other shows of like what is the actual truth of the Donner Party? So I am curious what the version was that was told to kids.

Well, I will keep you posted on that one. The last one I wanted to touch on was My America, which I didn't know about either. That was aimed at younger children like ages 7 and up.

Did you hear about that one at all?

Not a thing.

Same when I was reading about that on Wikipedia, I noticed the landing page that someone had linked to for Scholastic took you to the I Survived series that I mentioned earlier.

So I don't know if that was like an error by whoever was editing the page or if Scholastic has some kind of redirect going, but I just thought that was interesting.

I wonder if they like reissued the series with a new name and direction, but it's the same books.

Let's get into Voyage on the Great Titanic. Margaret Ann Brady is our protagonist. What did you find enjoyable about rereading this one?

She has a great voice as a character. I really enjoyed her narration.

She is this orphan from England she is a very serious girl, but with this like wry sense of humor and, and she essentially is hired to be a traveling companion. I think she's about to turn 13 if I remember correctly. And she's hired as a traveling companion for this very wealthy older woman.

It's like whoa, child labor. But she clearly is so exasperated and fascinated by all of this extravagant wealth in a way that felt very pointed and clear eyed and reminded me like how precocious and smart 12 and 13 year old girls are. It brought me back to being that age. But yeah, she was a great, she was a great perspective on this.

And also she's traveling in first class because she is in this role, but she herself is not from any sort of money. And so it was a really interesting vantage point onto the classism of the Titanic and the way that it was experienced.

I think that was a smart decision on the author's point, which I think she talks about in the author's note.

One thing that I didn't even like think about as a kid reading this was like how weird and fucked up it is that the orphanage can just kind of like sell off this orphan to a rich lady. Like, hello, like why is that? Okay, you're just going to. Okay. Like she wants, she wants to live in America. She wants to be with her brother.

So we're going to like. I'm sure the wealthy woman had to pay the orphanage some kind of, some to take her.

Yeah, I, it's, it's yikes is all I can say. And also just like if you were an older woman, why would you want to be escorted by a 12 or 13 year old?

Like it was interesting in insight into what type of servants would have been hired. And like I read so much historical romance where the like the, what's the word I'm looking for?

The not custodian, but like you have a companion, a traveling companion and it's usually like a spinster, like someone's older sister who never got married or like it's, or an elderly woman. The idea of being like this is my 13 year old who's going to take care of my dresses on the Titanic. It's kind of like, wow, yikes, there's my orphan, my designer orphan.

I know you've read and researched the Titanic a lot yourself. Do you know if that is historically accurate that it was like younger kids often brought along for like labor?

I'm sure it was. I don't really, I haven't heard of any like baby, like baby servants, you know, boss Baby, baby servants on the Titanic.

But I'm sure that's true there. Let me think. But there were a lot of. There are a few other characters. There's. I want to say Robert who is the.

He is the steward in first class and he is a 16 year old boy who has a job and is taking care of all these first class passengers. So there were a lot of adultified children I guess you could say who were in those roles and who did die on the Titanic.

And it's interesting to think about were they even considered in the children death toll or the employee of the Titanic death toll.

I'm pulling up my I survived graphic novel right now because it's a similar. It is a rich woman traveling with an 8 and 10 year old who are her niece and nephew.

And there's a funny moment that I, I feel like is more for like the parents who might read it alongside their kids. But it's like Aunt Daisy is so old, 22.

Oh my God.

It cracks me up. But those kids and their aunt are wealthy and she like falls in love with a third class man who of course lives because they give them a happy ending in this one. So it's kind of a weird.

The odds would not have been in their favor.

No, no. But yeah, it is interesting to see her also choosing an 8 and 10 year old as a companion.

Her husband had died the prior year and he always dreamed of going on the Titanic. And she takes her niece and nephew with her. Instead of interesting canceling the trip or anything interesting. What did you find held up well with the Titanic Dear America versus what didn't hold up as well?

I was very impressed by how historically accurate it was and that's partially in that they're name dropping all these real people who have these little cameos that are very realistic. There's mention of Bruce Ismay who was the head of the White Star line at the time. You briefly see the captain.

She meets Mr. Andrews who was the designer of the Titanic and they don't feel forced. It's not like she's eating with all of them at dinner as if she's Rose on the Titanic.

It's these little organic moments that feel really like rewarding for 34 year old Titanic enthusiast. But like could I could see being really interesting if you were a kid doing like a book report on this.

And like Also there's a one off mention of the gymnasium instructor Mr. Thomas McCrawley. Like there's all these little bits and pieces that I found really lovely.

And also the author avoids several very popular Titanic myths, which I appreciated. We do meet Mrs. Margaret Brown, who was the first class, like, vivacious American, who we.

In our American cultural understanding of the Titanic, we think of her as the unsinkable Molly Brown, played by Kathy Bates in the film by James Cameron. There was a musical like, she's this iconic character, but that was very much a Hollywood creation. She was not called Molly Brown by anyone.

That was something that Hollywood invented. And it made me happy to see that in this, it's like, no, she's Mrs. Brown.

And there were not any of these, like, extra pizzazzy touch points and, like, little things of, like, it didn't lean too heavily into the whole myth of male gentleman chivalry. Like, there were these nods to. In her experience.

And when she would have been leaving the ship, she would have been leaving with the first class, so she wouldn't necessarily see the final moments where, like, all of these. Everybody from steerage class is coming up, like. But she's. She's nodding to.

There are all of these little lines of, like, I bet there was so much heroism in third class as well. And, like, I bet there were people of all different races or nationalities who were behaving in a heroic way.

Like, this isn't replicating the myth that, like, the first class gentlemen were the heroes and everyone else was crazed. Like, this feels very deliberate with the way that it's depicting race and class and, like, unflattering of first class.

But also there are moments of true humanizing ness of first class passengers. Like, it just felt very measured in a way that Titanic narratives usually aren't.

That's a great point. I think I noticed a lot of those details too. And it is nice that they. They made such an effort to not flatten things.

There's a lot more nuance than I would expect and that you would find in a lot of Titanic media. Which was cool.

Right. One thing that I noticed that I don't think held up as well was there were several moments of fatphobia throughout the book that I was like, what?

What is that in here for? Just, like, so random throwaway lines that didn't add anything. Just, like, shitting on fat people or making them the butt of jokes.

It said more about when the book was written.

Yeah.

And, like, that era of, like, really nasty fatphobia being super mainstream. And it's just like in a children's book, no less. It just sucked.

Yeah. You mentioned some Titanic myths they don't have in this book. What are some of those Myths that you hear that you might have expected to be in here. Because I'm curious. I think one of them is in the I Survived book. I will tell you if you name it.

Mm, interesting. Let's see. The Margaret Molly Brown one stuck out to me because that's so in our cultural imagination, they also just completely avoided.

Did the ship break in half? Did it not break in half? And I will not go on my long monologue about that.

But there was disagreement at the time over whether or not the ship had broken in half as it was sinking. And it wasn't until the wreck was found that it was confirmed that the ship had broken in half. For a long time.

The common understanding was that it went down in one piece and this book kind of just like dipped around that. Like she didn't see it.

They don't comment on it in a way that felt very historically accurate both to what she would have seen because it was also incredibly dark. And also it's just not a focal point of the story. So that was another one where I was like, that's nice that it was just like it's.

It would have been a distraction. It would have felt forced.

And also just like things like the life belts being extraordinarily uncomfortable and like these little touches of people weren't boarding the lifeboats because it just seemed so unlikely that the ship would sink or it was cold and the lifeboats were open to the air and were really rickety. And so it's. It felt like a logical decision to passengers aboard to just like not want to get in the lifeboats because I'm sure everything's fine.

And they did not. No one really understood that there were not enough lifeboats. Like there was.

People did not realize that until they were all gone and there were still a lot of people aboard. So little things like that felt very true to the emotional experience, at least as I understand it, of what it was really like to be on deck in that moment.

The morning of the 14th in the I Survived book, the little sister is like counting lifeboats and she's like, oh no, there's only 16 lifeboats. That's not enough for everyone. And I'm like, no one was going to notice that.

I don't think an 8 year old kid was counting lifeboats and noticing that.

No, absolutely not. And also a lot of folks in steerage didn't even make it up to the top deck until the boats were all gone.

So it's not like there was this swarming mass of humanity of all of these hundreds and hundreds of people fighting over those lifeboats before they left. Like, it was. It took a while for people to get up.

There was a massive communication breakdown of people in third class not even being told that anything was happening. And they just felt that the ship hadn't moved or oh my God, my room is flooding.

Like, there was no centralized communication system or place plan for something like this happened. So, no, I do not think an 8 year old would be like, ooh, math.

Yeah. The myth I was wondering if you were going to mention was the mummy on the Titanic. Have you heard that myth before?

No. What?!

Apparently there was a myth that a mummy was aboard the Titanic. Someone had been traveling in Egypt, took a mummy from a tomb, and that was why the Titanic sank.

Well, that's a theory, yeah. Bad luck. Mummy curse.

In the I survived book, the boy is like, kind of a troublemaker and he gets up in the night and he goes and he walks down to the first class baggage area and he tries to break into a crate that has the mummy in it.

And then there's this other guy who's like a robber and he like steals his knife and opens the crate and then there's this big boom and the ship stops.

That's ludicrous. Okay? No child would be able to get into the cargo hold and mess around with a mummy crate, even if it were like, that's, that's, that's stupid.

I'm sorry. There are so many more interesting stories you can tell that really happened on the Titanic.

Like there were robberies, there were card sharps who were, who were getting first class gentlemen to give them all their money on the poker table as the ship was sinking. Like, there's so much you could do if you wanted a heist, right? Without being like a mummy. That's dumb. I'm mad when they're scholastic.

When they're in the Carpathia or on the Carpathia the next day, the sister is like, wait, you saw the mummy, right? Like, what do you, what do you think happened? Is it because when you open the mummy, is that why we sank? Is it the curse?

And then like, they find the guy who brought the mummy. It turns out he also survived. He also survived. They had said it was a mummy of a princess. They ask him, did you bring a princess on board the ship?

And he's like, yes, my princess. I miss her dearly. And they're like, oh, my gosh, it's real, it's true.

And he's like, yes, my cat, she died when I was in Egypt and I had them wrap her. So it was being a mummified cat that sank and it was not a cursed mummy.

Okay, I'm a little less angry now, but that is still. Again, there's so many things you could do in a book for children about the Titanic that would be age appropriate and exciting. And that's very silly.

Yeah. What was the point of that tangent? It's so silly.

Also, something that this book did very well was showing how traumatized a little girl would have been. And you would not be thinking, ooh, maybe that mummy is the jinx, blah, blah, blah. You would be shaking and not able to sleep or eat.

And probably if you were separated by your family, like, you heard all these people die. Like, I just find it very hard to believe they'd be like, wow, maybe it was the mummy that jinxed the ship.

There's a line in the I survived one where the boy is like, there are all these people who are crying and crying and I bet they're crying over their brothers or husbands or loved ones who, who didn't make it. And then it just like goes on. I'm like, yeah, no shit. They're crying over all the dead people. Like, what? Yes.

Also, like, it was a near death experience that also he would have had.

Like to continue on this tangent that I am driving us down now in The I survived one. The little boy is 10 years old.

The last lifeboat is going down with his sister in it, his aunt, and then the third class person that he's befriended is Marco. And he has a four year old named Enzo. So Enzo gets on the last lifeboat and Marco does not, because he's a third class man.

But George, the protagonist, a 10 year old boy, also does not. They're like, the lifeboat's full, we're leaving. And the aunt is like, he's just a child. He's only 10. Like, please, please.

And the lifeboat splashes down into the water and George like hits his head on something and blacks out. And then he wakes up and the ship is like fully vertical. And Marco's like, we gotta jump now, buddy. And they jump together.

And then like Marco's like swimming them to a lifeboat. He's like on a door, because of course he is.

And they finally get to the lifeboat and then someone like shoves them away and then George like paddles them to the other side and get. He's able to get up and no one helps him. But it's like, you didn't have to have George like, jump off the ship.

You didn't have to have him black out! It's like all these added things to dramatize it even further when, like, as a first kid class child, you probably would have just gotten on the lifeboat.

As a first class child, he would have been in the lifeboat. And that's. That's an age where he would have been obviously a little boy.

Like, if he'd been like 14, I could see drama of like, oh, you're a man, you shouldn't, blah, blah, blah. But that's ludicrous. And also the whole. So the door thing that we think of as Rose on the door. This sounds like a James Cameron ripoff in, like, a weird way.

Yep. But she marries the third class man later, of course.

Oh, of course. Oh, so he also survives?! Marco survives?!

Yes, he does.

That's not likely.

His feet are very frozen. But he survives. She takes care of his child while his feet are healing, which you would totally do with a man you just met.

Alrighty then. Sure.

The door story, and I only really learned this when I became like an amateur titaniac, Titanic obsessive is there was someone who survived on a door, and it was one of the six Chinese immigrants on board. It was a man. And. And he was rescued. He was pulled into a lifeboat and there was some weird anti Chinese racism going on, but he wound up helping Roe.

If I'm not conflating my survivor, my. My survivor stories, but, like, I just find it so fascinating that the survivor on the door has become part of the Titanic imagination we have.

But instead of it being a Chinese immigrant, we were like, look at all these sympathetic white people who it might have been.

Yeah, of course. I want to touch on the epilogue of the Dear America Titanic book as well, because I think you and I both felt a little tricked by it.

What was your reaction to reading the epilogue?

Was that the section where she has moved with her brother or was that the, like, historical?

It's like the flash forward and she, like, never speaks about the Titanic again for the rest of her life. She names her child Robert after the steward.

Yeah, I. The way it was constructed made me think, oh, this is a real person. Because it is, like, written as if it were the end of a historical biography.

Like, here's what happened with the rest of their life. And I did Google. I immediately googled her name. Being like, oh, I wonder if there are photos. I thought this was fictional. And it's like, no. The author made up this epilogue as well, which she got me. She did get me.

Yeah, the Marie Antoinette epilogue does a similar flash forward. Like, and she was killed at the guillotine, you know, but you'd know that's a real person. So of course he would kind of think something similar with an epilogue that has her whole life story. Like, I was definitely fooled as well.

I'm surprised they even needed to include it. Like, I feel like that almost reminds me of the James Cameron film as well. Of, like, here she is, an old lady throwing the necklace.

Like, to me, it's not actually that interesting what would have happened for the rest of her life. Because we don't know her as an adult. We don't know that character. And there's so much randomness. I was just like, I don't think this was necessary.

Necessary. And it fooled me.

Yes, obviously. I think I texted you a lot of crying emojis about her re her naming her kid Robert and then realized it was not real.

Yes, that was devastating. See, that's good storytelling!

Yeah, I was very invested.

That poor guy. When I was like, oh, he's only like 16. He must have been terror. Excuse my language. He must have been terrified.

He's like, please send this letter to my mom if you survive. Like, oh, my God, this kid should be in high school.

I saw some complaints from readers that, like, it didn't need a romance. Why did they have to kiss? But it was such, like, a chaste tween kiss that I was not like, this is a romance, you know?

No, it didn't feel like a romance.

And it was kind of nice to have this, like, this connection because it's her also straddling class as well, where she is in first class as a passenger, but she's still there to work. And she forms this bond with the steward who's taking.

Who's ostensibly supposed to cater to her as a passenger, but she's like, you really don't need to do that. And she finds him exciting and charming. And it, like, it felt really nice. It drove home for me that this is a child's experience.

And like, when you are a preteen or early teenager, you have a crush on the hot guy who's working on the Titanic. It would have annoyed me more if he'd survived. Then I would have been like, this is too much of a romance. This suspends disbelief.

Felt a lot more realistic that way. Unlike the I survived books.

I need to read those and just hate, hate text you through it. I will get so irritated.

I was thinking that it would not be your favorite.

The one thing That I thought was interesting with the fun facts at the end was the amount of a first class ticket price, which they said adjusted for inflation, it was $4,500 back then, which they said was around 103,000 today. And we were talking about how much inflation has increased. So it's actually more like $147,000 for a single ticket.

It's nutso when you think about it. And this is also like a. I don't remember how many days the voyage was supposed to be. I think they got a good four days out of it before it went down.

But it's a staggering amount of money and it goes to show how wealthy the first class passengers would have been and for folks who were in steerage class, how much it is all of their life savings to trans to restart their lives abroad. Like, this was a. Like, I don't. I can't even think of a comparison. Like, I don't know how much it is to go into space on those. On Jeff Bezos's rocket.

But, like, this is. It is unthinkable wealth and it's staggering the fact that they all. A lot of them died. Like, imagine shelling out that money and then being like, well, my husband died. That's crazy to me.

This also references the John Jacob Astor and his pregnant wife Madeline. And he was worth $87 million back, back then, which is over $2 billion now.

So really, if we want to eat or sink the rich, we can just do Titanic all over again.

The legacy of the Titanic killing billionaires. There was so much fascination at the time, understandably, with, holy shit. All of, like, our richest, most famous people are all dead. Like these.

They were the celebrities at the time where these massive socialites, like, these aristocrats, both American and English. And this was just. I can't even think it's like, what, like Princess Diana dying.

Like, I can't even think of a comparison of how staggering it would be. Like, if Brad Pitt were on a plane that blew up. I don't know, not even like, bigger than Brad Pitt. I also don't like Brad Pitt, so that'll be fine with me. But it's very surreal.

Just a note. Just the deposit to go on the Jeff Bezos's, certainly not shaped in a certain way, rocket is $150,000. just for the deposit. And tickets are roughly a million dollars.

Tickets are how much? roughly?

Around a million dollars.

Okay. Tim has a connection to a wealthy Rochester man who did go on the Titan submersible before it imploded. And I think he might be booked on a blue origin flight. He's done all kinds of exciting, exceedingly expensive things that it's like, don't you have better things to do with your money?

But I think he just donates his money to, like, the police union locally, which is gross and par for the course.

That's a man with a death wish. Like, I just. That is a man with a death wish. I cannot even imagine being like, oh, I didn't blow up in the Titan submersible. I should go to space next.

Couldn't be me. No. So we touched on it a little bit just now. But why is it that the Titanic is still so compelling to people, like, over a hundred years later? We're coming up on the 114th anniversary.

There are a lot of reasons. I could do a whole. Someone I'm sure has done a whole dissertation. When you look at the scope of American history and that time in American history, this was such a loss of innocence, of whole. Like, the fact that this happened was so unthinkable at the time, and there was so much change that was about to happen that this felt like a real.

Not even a wake up call, just like an incredible change for the entire world of industry is fallible. The old ways are dying. And so the cultural shock of the Titanic really changed everything at the time.

And as a result, it did become this symbol that is still with us today. I think the first class versus third class and the unfairness of it has always resonated.

Resonates even more now as we live with staggering income inequality and. And there is a little weird bit of schadenfreude that we have that definitely came out around the Titan submersible.

But it's also just this, like, gross negligence of corporations, too. The idea that this, that the White Star Line killed hundreds of people essentially, even though they were following the regulations of the day. Like, the way that the lifeboat requirements worked had to do with. I think it's the tonnage of the ship. It had nothing to do with how many passengers were on board. And that now is crazy.

Looking back, like, that's not how that should have ever worked. But the White Star Line didn't really do anything wrong as a corporation when it came to the lifeboats. And that's wild. Like, I don't even. There's so many things about it that are so strange.

The gender element, obviously, the way that we think about women and children first versus women and children only, and the way that that has become so ingrained in our cultural understanding. Of chivalry and of arguments about privilege that do women have privilege and advantages versus like.

Like people have weaponized the gender politics of the Titanic to really whatever aim they have. Which I have written about and will scream about forever if I. If anybody wants to hear my rant.

But there's just so much fodder that you can project any real type of social anxiety onto the Titanic. And it is such a spectacular story of so many little things went wrong. And I think I'll just speak for myself.

Whenever I'm reading an account of the Titanic or watching a film, there's this little part of me that always thinks maybe this time it won't happen because there will be.

This person will get the iceberg warning or this person will get the message, or the Californian that was so close by will turn their radio on and get the. Get the S.O.S. Like, there are all of these moments where it could have not happened this way.

And I think that is so compelling and torturous, even over 100 years later of just like this, it didn't need to happen. And the loss of life is just staggering.

That and also the statistics of who died and who survived. Like, just how severe the loss of life was among third class passengers versus first class passengers.

Like, I think I was just writing about this the other day and I don't have it in front of me, but like, your survival odds as a first class man, I think were, if not better than very, like, not that far behind your odds of surviving as a child in third class. Like, it is so repulsive the way that classism impacted who survived and who didn't of the Titanic.

Ugh. Just brutal. You said everything so perfectly and poignantly that I don't have anything.

Oh, good! I felt like I was just rambling.

No, it was great. It's great. I'm listening raptly. Has reading Dear America as a kid, do you think it impacted your interests as a reader and as a writer?

In the Titanic or in history?

I think in history in general. I know you read a lot of historical romance now.

I think something the Dear America series did very well is make these moments in history that seem so foreign, making them relatable by saying, okay, here's someone who's your age and who might have your sense of humor or have normal anxieties like you or normal things that you love to do.

It was great at putting you in that perspective and helping you experience something that seems so removed in a way that felt approachable and accurate and just like a fun read, even if it's something harrowing. There's a reason I kept picking them up. I adored them even though I had never heard of the historical events that were being described.

And it did instill. I don't know if I already liked history or if I liked history because of these books, but I think as a kid who would grow into a very ideologically strident little rebel with a cause activist, these books are very good at slowly introducing you to some of these concepts of classism or workers rights. We talked about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory books.

Like, it helps you understand these issues that are very serious in a way that makes sense to you and appeals to this like childish sense of like, that's not fair. So very thankful to these books.

That makes a lot of sense that it could lead you in that direction. I'm thinking of how like oblivious I was as a kid in some ways. And I think some of it might have gone over my head or like not completely over my head.

But I know Anne Rinaldi was one of the writers of some of the Dear America books and I read some of her non Dear America books and in flipping through those on Goodreads, the reviews are like terrible.

And a lot of it is like Civil War era stuff like woman in the south who kind of sympathizes with the men, but also kind of feels bad for slaves and like torn between the two. And I feel like I might have like been too sympathetic to that kind of white woman who like...I don't know. It's interesting.

It was very much a product of the time. And that's not to absolve it, but I think if this were to exist today, I'd be very curious how it would be written and how some of those stories would be written, what perspectives would be chosen and how popular the books would even be. This is me looking back in a nostalgic way. I really don't know how much of the history I fully absorbed.

And I don't remember any of the story of this book. Reading it as a child. I remember feeling it, I remember holding it, but I don't remember the story. And there are moments that I think I can imagine myself being really aghast by as like a 12 year old reader, but I don't.

It didn't make enough of an impact where I remember the story itself the way that I remember books like Ella Enchanted or Like A Wrinkle in Time or like the Phantom Tollbooth. But those were also books that I returned to and that were in the conversation.

Whereas these are much more like mass market type of franchise books that you, like, tear through because they were produced that way to be part of a longer series. I don't know. It's interesting to think about.

I was just trying to picture what a modern one would even be. And the first thing that came to mind was like, I'm one of the people that filmed George Floyd's murder. And here's like a year in my life around that. Like, it'd be so, so dark, but it would be very interesting.

I could see. It would be interesting to do, like, the kid activist from Flint, Michigan, because I remember there was a Little Miss Flint who's probably now an adult, but, like, I can think of. There are people in our cultural history, but it does feel just so bleak to imagine.

The parkland kids surviving the school shooting and.

Oh my God.

Yeah, yeah.

My immediate thought when you mentioned what they would look like today is I was like a kid being like, I survived Y2K.

I was in the second tower on 9/11.

That was where my head went, was like, oh, no, don't mention 9/11. Don't do it, Ella.

I was the kid on the Titan submersible, and I did not survive.

What's that?

I was the teenage boy on the Titan submersible with his dad.

Oh, that poor kid.

Poor kid.

I feel bad for that kid.

Yeah.

Okay. Before we move on, there was one moment in this book that messed me up emotionally that I was so aghast by, which is that. So the woman she's working for, Mrs. Carstairs, I wrote in my notes, Mrs. Carstairs can eat shit. Because there's this moment in the book where she gets on the lifeboat and then she goes, oh, but I can't leave without her.

And she's describing her dog. And then she turns to Margaret, who's, like, stepping into the lifeboat. She goes, no, no, no, Margaret. Wait until all the first class ladies are in the lifeboats. And then you can go, and I'll meet up with you later.

And it was one of those moments where I was just like, okay, this lady did not know that there were not a lot of lifeboats. But I was just so mad. I, like, gasped as I was reading this on my phone. And Kindle and Mrs. Carstairs can eat shit is all I will say.

Outrageous. Yeah, absolutely. This is a very tiny thing compared to that not evil, but just a silly thing.

So you were talking about the details that are so accurate about this Dear America book. I think there's a part where the protagonist talks about how when you talk about a ship, you call it by its name, but you don't use the so like Titanic, she, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the I Survived books, it annoyed me so much that they kept calling it the Titanic. And I was like, they don't even know the basic facts of ship naming!

There are a lot of, like, little details that are not capital I important in historical fiction that drive history buffs and enthusiasts bananas. And that's the type of thing that is, like, the level of care is just not there.

Right.

And you wouldn't know it as a casual reader, but as someone with an eye to history, it's like, oh, well, I don't have to trust anything you say if you can't get this one thing that is, like, so basic to people who know this history. So, yeah, I'm not getting five stars from the I Survived book.

No. So with our final thoughts and stuff, I wanted to share some of the recommendations and thoughts I got from youth librarians that I talked to.

That is actually why I read some of the I Survived books. Both of the youth librarians I talked to said, I Survived is huge, like a giant hit with all of the middle grade readers these days. They say Dear America is not as popular anymore. I Survived. If they do, like, any kind of contest or give away the library, it, like, is the best prize that the kids could get.

So people really love it, which is why I picked it up.

I talked to Amanda, who is a librarian in Illinois, and one of the ones she mentioned that people might like is if you like the epistolary format, why is that so hard to say? Letters, diaries, whatever. The correspondence she said, is super buzzy right now, and people might enjoy that. And just any historical fiction. A lot of it is very richly detailed or narrative nonfiction, if you like the different time periods.

Lauren, who's a librarian in upstate New York, she said tweens really are not reading Dear America anymore. But I survived again as super popular. Her tweens really want fantasy and realistic fiction. Some boys are very into historical fiction, especially World War II. She says, yeah, I Survive bridges the gender divide and gets kids into nonfiction, so that's kind of cool. And the graphic novel adaptations are very popular. She said historical romance is worth checking out for adults who love Dear America as kids. Some of her favorites are Alexander Vasti, Sarah Maclean, Evie Dunmore, and some connections to Taylor Jenkins Reid or Kristin Hannah type historical fiction.

A lot of people are talking about that on like Bookstagram and booktok, so I'm curious about that one. Are there any other recommendations you would add for people who love these books?

As kids I am a huge historical romance fanatic so I co signed that recommendation and I have not read this yet because it is not out yet.

But there is a queer Titanic historical romance coming out for the anniversary next month by Logan Sage Adams called Across the Living Infinite and I'm very excited to read it. It is gay men on the Titanic and I'm pretty sure they both live because it hasn't happily ever after. But it goes into classism and I'm just excited. This is an author who's been very highly recommended to me. So Across the Living Infinite. If you want some more Titanic romance.

that sounds great. I will definitely be checking that one out. Do you think you'll go back and read any more Dear America or Royal Diaries books after we had this talk?

I would love to, honestly, and I would. I'm trying to remember the ones that I remember reading. There was one World War II one in the dear America line that I remember holding it. It's another one that I have a very visceral memory of. Not the story, but just the book itself. And I would be really curious. I also would love to see how they talk about things at the Titanic. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. There are so many historical events that I only know now as an adult that I'm like, how would you explain this to a kid? Yeah, totally. I would love to.

I'm curious about some of the more global ones in the Royal Diaries and I have the Cleopatra one checked out from the library right now because I'm not sure how well they represented those kinds of things, but I'll be very curious.

I'm very intrigued. It does seem like a running theme in the reviews that we saw on Goodreads and texted about was that this series doesn't always do a great job with women of color and I'm very curious how like the princess. I don't know. I'm like, what? There are so many myths about Cleopatra. Yeah, you'll have to text me excerpts. I'm very curious.

I feel like I read that one as a kid, but I have no memory of it. So we'll see if any of it comes flooding back, but I doubt it. Any other final thoughts before we close out?

I'm just so excited we did this because I have this well of Titanic knowledge that I do not know what to do with. And whenever someone's like, hey, do you want to do this Titanic adjacent thing? I get so freaking amped. There's this cultural imagination of the Titanic that we have that is very simple and black and white. And in reality there's so much more to learn and so much nuance and all these weird stories and.

And there's also how did we remember the Titanic at certain moments in time? Which is very interesting. So if you were a Titanic kid in the 90s, there's so much more Titanic content for you to consume. Now the. I believe it was the BBC or Channel 4, they just did a series that I cannot recommend highly enough if you can find it online. A little hard if you're in America. I had a friend put it on their plex server for me. It's called the Titanic Sinks Tonight.

And the way it's done is so genius. It is shot and edited documentary style. And they have these. They hired actors to read and perform in character accounts from survivors. So it's as if you're watching a documentary about any other thing where they're interviewing people who were there, but it is actors performing real journal excerpts or testimony. And it is so engrossing and it's just. It's excellent. So come on back. If you were a Titanic hyper fixation kid, there's so much more to learn.

That sounds great. I'm going to have to watch that for sure. The last thing I'm thinking about still is that paper that I texted you about. I wrote a paper about the Titanic in college and it made me think about how I was not as smart as I thought I was in college, but now I'm thinking about my thesis and being like, hmm, was it so dumb that it came all the way around to being smart again?

Because I was arguing that we should remember the Titanic not for the sinking, but for everything it represented and how grand it was and all the social class stuff and blah, blah, blah. Which, yeah, maybe, I guess, like, there is something to that, I suppose.

But I mean, it was an incredible feat of industry. Like, it really was. There's a reason people called it a miracle. Like, it was stunning. And if they had maybe done a better Job preparing for it, sinking. We would remember it not as a failure, but as this incredible breakthrough.

But yeah, they didn't really know how to do bulkheads yet to prepare for sinking. There's some kinks to work out, but perspective is. I mean, what a great devil's advocate take too, to be like, we should actually celebrate the Titanic.

I think it just is such a cultural moment too of optimism and like faith in technology and everything humans could do. And like, I don't think we felt like that in quite a while.

And just like it's. It was still relatively new to have an ocean liner like it used to be. The crossing the ocean took weeks, months. And it's like, surprise.

You can do it in a few days now and it's going to be astronomically expensive. But like, that was unthinkable at the time. The idea that you could send telegrams and wireless communications, like part of the reason. So, okay, I cannot get into the Marconi telegram or we'll be here all night. But like, there were people who were just so excited to telegraph their friends from the Titanic, even when they were probably going to see them very soon after. It was just such a moment of achievement.

And I think one of the things that is so poetic about the Titanic is that with the exception of Bruce Ismay, who was the executive on board, the people who created the Titanic died on the Titanic. Thomas Andrews, who designed it, went down with that ship and was never seen again. And there's something in that that is so. It's like almost too eerie to be true, but yeah. What a. What a ship. What a ship with a lady.

And shout out to the Carpathia that rescued everyone at great risk to itself and to Captain Rostrom who hauled ass to rescue people like that is. I want the. I want the movie about the Carpathia. Where is that movie?

Do it. Write the fan fiction. Get busy! Thank you so much for doing this, Ella. This was really fun. I hope people enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Thank you very much for having me.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchador podcast network.

It's so funny that Ella brought up a documentary with readings.

My favorite Dear America product is Dear Letters Home from Vietnam, a feature length documentary film featuring real life letters written by American soldiers and read by actors such as Ellen Burstyn, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Michael J. Fox and Harvey Keitel. A delight for the entire family.

What?!