Love Thy Neighbor: The Tory Diary of Prudence Emerson

This is another book in the Dear America series that is written from the viewpoint of someone on the "losing side" in a war. In this case, it is the Revolutionary War which, the book notes in its historical section, was to a degree a Civil War since about a third of the people in the colonies were Tories, or Loyalists, people who supported the British King and British rule over the colonies.

The novel does a tremendous job of showing just how people can turn against other people who believe "differently" then they do even though they have lived with the people for all their lives. There are parallels with events going on in this country at the present time, as people who oppose people who are gay, etc, who who believe in the right of a woman to have an abortion have, at times, and in increasing numbers, taken to violence in their opposition rather than just verbally stating their opposition to what someone else believes.

In this "diary", we see how Prudence's patriot neighbors first take to verbal attacks and shunning her and her family because they are Tories. This then escalates into acts of mischief that don't really do any violence, and from there to acts of overt violence such as the theft of a horse all the way to actually attacking someone's house and the people in it.

We see that people are swept up in the emotions of their beliefs and, for some, their lives will be changed forever as a result. Places that were safe no longer remain safe. People that were once friends become enemies. Lives that seemed fairly settled end up becoming chaotic, all due to people believing different things than other people and thinking everyone should think the same way that they do.

One of the many strong points in this series is that it also shows us what the people's daily lives were like in those times, and we can see just how much harder of a time they had than we do physically as far as the household chores they had to do, health dangers that existed (such as smallpox), and how they lacked virtually all of our "technological" devices that we have today such as radio, tv, etc, yet they still had fulfilled lives.


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