Dear America Books in Order

Dear America is a diary-style historical fiction series built around fictional girls living through major moments in American history. Each book is presented as a first-person diary, which makes the format easy to enter. A reader does not watch history from a distance. She sits with one girl’s daily worries, chores, fears, mistakes, and hopes.

Ann Rinaldi wrote one entry for the series: My Heart is on the Ground.

The book is framed as the diary of Nannie Little Rose, a twelve-year-old Sioux girl sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1880. Through Nannie’s writing, the story looks at separation from family, forced assimilation, new language, clothing, school discipline, and the pain of being told that home and culture must be left behind.

The setting is important. Carlisle was one of the best-known Native boarding schools in the United States, and its purpose was not simply education in the ordinary sense. Schools like Carlisle were designed to reshape Native children into white American norms, often by cutting hair, changing names, punishing Native languages, and separating children from their communities. That history gives the book its emotional weight.

For modern readers, this is also a book that benefits from context.

My Heart is on the Ground has been criticized by Native scholars, educators, and reviewers for historical problems and for how it portrays Native characters and Carlisle. That does not mean the book has no place on a reading list, but it does mean it should not be treated as a stand-alone source on Native boarding school history. It is best read with Native-authored accounts, nonfiction about Carlisle, and guided discussion.

As a Dear America book, it shares the series’ main appeal: a young narrator gives history an immediate voice. The diary form lets readers feel confusion and fear as they happen, not as polished memories later. Rinaldi’s entry is especially serious in tone, because the subject is not adventure or immigration alone, but cultural loss and survival under pressure.

If you are reading Ann Rinaldi in order, this book sits alongside her other stories about young people caught inside systems they did not create. If you are reading Dear America, it is one of the entries that asks for extra care, extra context, and a willingness to talk about what historical fiction can do well and where it can fall short.