by Ellen Emerson White

Scholastic, $12.99, 206 pages

The Titanic will always fascinate people from all ages and walks of life. What if you could be there through the eyes of someone who truly lived through the entire ordeal? Someone who had their own life and events that brought them to the Titanic and all they endured. Dear America: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady: Voyage on the Great Titanic composed by Ellen Emerson White is the true account of one passenger on that fateful 1912 journey to America. Her story begins leisurely; building the excitement to what we know is the inevitable demise of Titanic’s fateful maiden voyage. As the story peaks with the actual accounting of the iceberg and the sinking of the ship, in true diary form, the story speeds up and details are lost.

Until the day Margaret died she held some strange notion that she shouldn’t have survived, that the hundreds who lost their lives should have taken her place. It makes sense that the story should wane in respect for those that sacrificed their place in the boats for others to live on. A poignant, haunting reading, complete with the timeline of events and actual photographs and artifacts from the Titanic, gives the readers a morbid, yet somberly hopeful study while reliving the ultimate, tragic and horrifying event.

Reviewed by M. Chris Johnson,