Book two of Deanna Bennett’s Anna Immigration Trilogy, where the ship docks and the trip isn’t over. A tribute and a review.
In March 1914, fifteen-year-old Anna and her mother see the Statue of Liberty through a porthole in steerage. Most stories would end there, with the torch and the skyline and the swelling music. Deanna Bennett started her second book there instead, because for an immigrant the arrival was only the beginning of the trouble.
I knew Deanna as the woman who ran the East Lake Writers’ Workshop in Palm Harbor, and I spent many hours at her table critiquing these books as she wrote them, chapter by chapter, along with everybody else’s work. Anna: American Journey is the middle of the trilogy she built from her grandmother’s life, and it’s the book where America stops being an idea and starts being a place with people in it.
What happens in Anna: American Journey?
Anna runs into a medical challenge on Ellis Island, the kind of inspection that could send a girl back across the ocean alone. Then she and her mother keep traveling, west toward Chicago, and she learns firsthand how people disdain immigrants, fear them and prey on them.
On the train, Anna stumbles onto a terrifying secret that puts hundreds of innocent people at risk, and her own life with them. A fifteen-year-old with limited English, in a new country, holding information that could get her killed. Who’s going to believe her?
That’s the question the whole trilogy keeps asking, and it’s a fair one to ask about any newcomer. Deanna didn’t soften the answer.
In memory
Remembering Deanna Bennett: the founder of the East Lake Writers’ Workshop, the woman at the head of the table, and the writer behind the Anna books.
Why does Ellis Island matter so much in the Anna books?
Because it was a gate, and gates can close. Deanna’s research went deep into what the island was like for the people passing through it, and the medical inspection in this book carries real dread for that reason. Her grandmother came through that building. Deanna gave talks on European immigration to genealogy societies after writing these books, and she knew the process in detail.
I like that she didn’t treat the island as a postcard. For a lot of families it’s a line on a passenger manifest and nothing more. Deanna turned it back into a room full of frightened people waiting to hear whether they could stay.
Keep reading
Ghostwriting a family history book: turning genealogy, photos and a passenger manifest into a story your grandchildren will read.
Do you need to read Anna: Going to America first?
Yes. It’s the second book, and it starts the moment the first one ends. Read Anna: Going to America for the crossing, this one for the arrival and the train west, and Anna: American Dream for the years in Chicago that follow. Anna: American Journey is available on Amazon.
Deanna spent her retirement on these books. She was right to. A girl in a porthole staring at a statue deserved more than a line on a manifest, and her granddaughter gave her three books.
