This attention to historic detail extends even to Catherine's writing style. Despite the fact that the Halls and their neighbors and friends enjoy a very simple life, Blos clearly invested much time in historical research and makes early American pioneer life quite vivid. They even conspire to have him meet and fall for the Shipmans's Aunt Lucy (the Shipmans being the Halls's neighbors, and Cassie Shipman her best friend).Īll these things and many others, from maple harvests to ice breaking to phantom runaway slaves, are recorded in great detail in Catherine's diary. Their father, Charles, is a good father and a hard worker, but the locals wonder why he hasn't remarried. Though Joan Blos's A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 is fiction, she admirably captures these elements, recreating life in a different era.Ĭatherine Hall is the daughter of a farmer, and older sister to the girl Matty-the girls's mother died four years earlier. New Hampshire in the early 1830s was still part of the United States frontier, a wild and semi-civilized land of farmers fighting the elements and the harshness of their lifestyle.
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