Tear Jerker / American Girls Collection

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Kaya (1764)

• Kaya's Escape:
  • Kaya, her horse Steps High, and her adopted sister Speaking Rain are captured and enslaved by an enemy tribe. Kaya wants to escape with her sister, but because Speaking Rain is blind, she tells Kaya to escape on her own since Speaking Rain will only slow her down. Although Kaya does escape with another slave, Two Hawks, and makes it back to her own tribe, she suffers Survivor's Guilt over having to leave Speaking Rain behind for the rest of the series until they finally reunite.
  • Two Hawks' story is sad, as well. He has been separated from his family and tribe since he was very young.
  • While enslaved, Kaya has to watch Steps High being beaten by a man who wants to ride her, and can't do anything to protect her beloved horse.
• Kaya's Hero:
  • Kaya admires a warrior woman in her tribe named Swan Circling and wants to be as brave as her. However, she is worried that if Swan Circling finds out about how she got her Embarrassing Nickname, Magpie, or the fact she had to leave Speaking Rain behind when she escaped, she won't like her or want to be her friend.
  • Swan Circling goes out to get a medicinal plant for a sick baby in the middle of winter, but never returns. It turns out that her horse stepped on thin ice, which cracked, and it panicked and threw her off. She fell and hit her head on a boulder, which killed her.
  • Mixed with heartwarming — after Swan Circling's funeral, Kaya's mother reveals to her that the warrior woman did know about her nickname and how she had to leave Speaking Rain behind, and still thought she was a brave and strong girl. So much, in fact, that she wanted Kaya to inherit her name: the greatest gift a Nimiipuu can give.
  • Early in the book, Kaya and her family have a conversation about how it's sad that Swan Circling and her husband, Claw Necklace, don't have any children. Sadly, after Swan Circling is killed, they will never have that chance.

Felicity (1774)

• Go on. Listen to Felicity begging God to spare her mother's life in her film and try not to break down crying. Then Felicity falls apart sobbing in her father's arms.
• Felicity spends weeks secretly bonding with Penny, an abused horse belonging to the mean tanner, Jiggy Nye. They become so close that Penny trusts the girl to ride her, and Felicity rides her into town to show her family that Penny is tame...but Jiggy Nye shows up to take her back, and nobody can do anything about it, even though they know he's going to beat, starve and possibly even kill her. Not even Felicity's father offering to buy Penny sways him. The only thing Felicity can do is go to Penny's pasture one more time and secretly set her loose, not knowing if she'll ever see her again, but content with knowing Penny is alive and free.
  • The conversation Felicity and Ben have at the end of the book:
    Ben: Did you let her go?
    Felicity: (nods, teary-eyed) Penny is free. She freed herself.
    Ben: It's the best thing.
    Felicity: Aye. But I hope she doesn't feel I've abandoned her. That would break my heart. She knows that I love her, doesn't she, Ben?
    Ben: She knows. She knows you love her so much you let her go free. You gave her what she needed most—her independence.
• The death of Felicity's beloved grandfather. Their last scene together in the book is nothing to brush aside. Felicity reads to him from the Bible and tries to comfort him, telling him soon he'll be back on his beloved plantation. All he can do is say her name once more, and passes away in the night. Later, Felicity's mother gives her a riding habit he'd intended as a present for her and Felicity, who's been Unable to Cry, breaks down sobbing in her mother's arms.
  • It's just as bad in the movie. No breakdowns from Felicity, but her grandfather suffers a fatal heart attack during a pleasant conversation with her. Doubles as Nightmare Fuel if you've ever watched a relative die.
• The Perils of King's Creek, where Felicity found out the man she befriended was a Loyalist spy and was going to sell out the locations of all the Patriot plantations, including the one her family inherited. She notes that her late grandfather, a Loyalist, wouldn't have sold out his neighbors and friends that way.

Caroline (1812)

• Caroline being separated from her father in the first book, due to him being imprisoned by the British. Even painful from the perspective of her mom and grandmother (his in-law): First your husband/father was killed in the American Revolution and now the British have captured your son-in-law/husband and those relatives living just across the lake in Canada are hard to reach.
• The Smuggler's Secrets had Uncle Aaron's ailing neighbor Mrs. Sinclair find out that her husband has been smuggling goods to the British, just to support her, the fact that she's wailing shows that he never even asked if she was okay with that. Now she's left alone with only neighbors to care for her since he has been arrested and she can't even get a divorce from him.

Josefina (1824)

• Josefina's Surprise:
  • When Josefina and Tía Dolores are outside, some musicians are playing a lullaby song and Tía Dolores asks Josefina to sing it for her. Josefina starts to sing it, but can't finish because she and her mother used to sing it together every Christmas, and the memory makes her choke up.
  • When the sisters are preparing for Christmas, Clara bitterly states that it won't be the same without their mother, but at least they'll still have her embroidered altar cloth. They excitedly take it out of the box, only to find out that the cloth is so badly damaged it's practically unrecognizable, stained by water, completely filthy, and has been chewed by mice.
    Clara: It's ruined! It's ruined, just like Christmas! (runs from the room and slams the door)
    • Even worse is Ana's sad comment afterwards that she's glad their mother isn't there to see the ruined cloth, because it would break her heart.
• After all the work Josefina does to get over her fear of that nasty nanny goat Florecita, Florecita dies giving birth to a kid in Happy Birthday, Josefina!.

Cécile and Marie-Grace (1853)

• The Cécile and Marie-Grace series takes place during the Yellow Fever plague of 1853, and over time, we see the effects of that. The orphanages are filling up, Marie-Grace lost her mother and baby brother prior to the beginning of the series, and the maid who worked for Cécile's family, Ellen, dies from the fever. Then Cécile's older brother Armand gets the fever and comes close to death.
• Marie-Grace is almost sent out of New Orleans to stay with an aunt until the Yellow Fever stops. The farewells she bids her friends are just too much.

Kirsten (1854)

• From Kirsten's first book, the death of her friend Marta after she contracts cholera. Kirsten's father nearly admonishes her for crying about it, but her mother simply embraces the distraught girl and says, "Let her have her tears."
  • The stage adaptation Home is Where the Heart Is makes it even worse. Where in the book Marta dies offpage and Kirsten only sees her coffin being carried away for burial, in the play Kirsten sneaks into the sick bay and shares a last conversation with Marta, who then dies in front of her.
• At the end of Kirsten Learns a Lesson, Kirsten has to say goodbye to her Indian friend, Singing Bird, because her tribe is leaving the area to find food due to the lack of deer. Singing Bird even asks Kirsten to come with them, but of course she can't.
• The Runaway Friend has several:
  • The Larson family's stresses are causing a lot of short fuses, even where the usually optimistic Kirsten feels like a disappointment and inconvenience to her parents, especially after Papa snaps at her attempt to be helpful. When she goes out to find a wandering cow, Papa makes the mistake of telling her not to get lost since they have no time to look for a lost girl.
    Was that the only thing that worried Papa — that if she got lost, he'd have to waste time coming to find her? Kirsten got up and brushed her hands on her skirt, avoiding his gaze. "Yes, Papa," she said. "I'll be careful not to get lost."
  • The hired boy Erik's own sister needs to get away from her unkind husband.
  • The Green family's own struggles with the matriarch's worries and how they quit on The American Dream.

Addy (1864)

• Meet Addy:
  • Addy overhearing her parents' conversation about possibly running away to freedom. Momma is afraid to do so because the family will be split up if they get caught, but Poppa has this to say:
    I hurt when I see Addy toting heavy water buckets to the fields, or when I see her working there, bent over like a old woman. Sam already fifteen, but she a little girl, nine years old, and smart as they come. She go out in the morning, her eyes all bright and shining with hope. By night she come stumbling in here so tired, she can hardly eat. Esther still a little baby, but Addy getting beat down every day. I can't stand back and watch it no more.
  • Addy's father and brother are sold and she tries to stop it, but Master Stevens starts whipping her. Momma decides to take her and leave for the North because she's afraid the man who bought Poppa and Sam might want to buy Addy too, but they can't take baby Esther because her crying would get them caught, or Uncle Solomon and Auntie Lula because they're too old to make the journey. The whole family is separated for two years, and they never see Uncle Solomon again, because he dies before he can meet up with them in Philadelphia.
  • Addy's great-grandmother, Aduke, was kidnapped from Africa and brought to the United States when she was a young girl. She never saw her family again, and the only thing she had with her to remind her of them was a single cowrie shell, the one Momma gives to Addy to wear as a necklace.
• There's one of these in Addy's My Journey book. Addy and Momma are wistfully singing a lullaby, imagining Auntie Lula singing it to Esther and nostalgic when their family was whole. The reader insert remembers her own mother tucking her in at night and how her mother still remembers her talking to the moon when she was little.
  I turn to the window in the garret. "Moon," I whisper.
  Addy stops singing. "What'd you say?"
  "Mom," I say, trying not to cry. "I miss my mother."
  "Of course you do, honey," Mrs. Walker says softly. "She misses you, too."
• This one's minor, but Addy discovering her brother Sam lost an arm in the war during their reunion in Addy Saves the Day.
• Happy Birthday, Addy! has a rather sobering moment when Addy and Sarah have a truly awful day when they go and run some errands for M'dear, an old woman that lives in the boarding house. The cashier at the drugstore is blatantly racist and is incredibly nasty to them (after being perfectly pleasant to a white girl), and when they try to take a streetcar home, a fight breaks out when a black man tries to get on at a stop where the driver said "whites only!". Finally, the driver orders all "colored people" to get off, forcing the two girls to walk home. When they get back, hours later than they expected to, they tell M'dear what happened, and Addy caps it all off by bitterly saying that the North prides itself on being free of racism, but it's not, and how the city that calls itself "the city of brotherly love" doesn't seem to have any for black people. Even though she learns to keep up hope even if things aren't that great at the moment, it's rather sad to see Addy, whose defining trait is her hope for a life where she'll be equal to any white person, and is usually optimistic enough to believe in it, be so cynical. And the worst of it is, she's not wrong.
• Harriet crying over her uncle being killed in the war in Addy Saves the Day, especially when you realize that her obnoxious bragging about him was really because she was so proud of him and loved him so much.
• Momma is observably hurt when Esther reaches for Auntie Lula during their reunion; Addy describes her mother's faces as looking as if she might cry because her own baby didn't know her. Despite what Auntie Lula did over the years to help Esther remember the Walkers, Esther still doesn't quite know her family properly after two years apart since she was so young when they were separated..
• The deaths of Uncle Solomon and Auntie Lula in Changes For Addy. Uncle Solomon died before he could ever be reunited with the family and Addy laments that he barely got to enjoy freedom. And in their last talk, Auntie Lula all but tells Addy she's going to die soon, and she passes away just before Christmas. Addy's so devastated she almost can't bring herself to read the Emancipation Proclamation at church.
• In one of the tie-in books, Addy's reaction to finding out Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated.
• The events in Shadows On Society Hill where the Walker family is experiencing trouble after Addy was accused of stealing her father's employer's fiancee's jewelry: Esther is sick and gets close to death, Momma said she "wishes" she could believe Addy's pleas for innocence, and Poppa's job is on the line and they might end up homeless.

Samantha (1904)

• The background of Samantha and her family.
  • Prior to the first book, Grandmary was widowed and she lost her daughter and son-in-law in a boating accident and has to care for her young granddaughter. The older woman shuts away all mementos of her daughter (even childhood photos) and probably had a hard time coming to terms with it.
  • Samantha feels the pain of losing her parents and wants to hear stories about them and she still is hurt when someone is separated from her (the seamstress Jessie after the birth of her son, Nellie in the first book) and she is so well-behaved, but is probably afraid to reveal her feelings.
  • Nellie: She starts off only somewhat literate, has been working since she was very young, her parents send her on her lonesome to work in a small town as a seamstress so her health isn't damaged by factory conditions, she is treated poorly by one of her employers, she gets picked on in school by her classmates AND teachers, her friend Samantha means well but is often clueless and privileged, she loses her parents, her uncle neglects her and her sisters and takes away their money and belongings to fuel his alcoholism, she and her sisters are packed off to an Orphanage of Fear where the headmistress starves and abuses them, she is threatened with separation from her sisters, and despite being adopted by a young, wealthy couple she still is traumatized enough to fear being abandoned by her new parents and is afraid of her Uncle taking her and her sisters away.
• The normally jovial Uncle Gard seeing his sister's old sketchbook in Samantha Saves the Day, given that he's remembering the deaths of his sister and brother-in-law and all the memories they had growing up and vacationing on Piney Point, Gard is a jovial and easygoing guy, but here you get a glimpse of how hurt he was by her death. It's emotionally jarring, along with the fact that his niece and sisters-in-law could've been killed the same way earlier.
• In Samantha's book Real Stories From My Time: Titanic; Cornelia, her young son, and Nellie travel to Ireland and have to travel back on the Titanic. They survive, but the family back in the States has to deal with waiting, anxiety, grieving, past trauma, and the Poor Communication Kills that comes with how news was transferred in 1912.

Rebecca (1914)

• In Rebecca and Ana, Josef, Rebecca's older cousin and Ana's eldest brother, is ill on arrival to Ellis Island and is detained there, becoming vulnerable to being sent back to Russia. For some time, there is great concern that he will be sent back.
• In Candlelight for Rebecca, Rebecca's teacher Miss Maloney is cold and uncaring when it comes to their discussion about Rebecca and her family not celebrating Christmas, saying that Christmas is an American holiday and celebrating is part of being an American. The social pressure Rebecca in under for much of the book is tremendous given how her older twin sisters are scolded for fixing their hair with holly and bells (lest it upset their grandmother) and Rebecca does everything she can to complete her assignment and hide her project without her grandmother finding out and being displeased.
  • The worst thing is that teachers like Miss Maloney, especially in communities with immigrant populations, were set on assimilating them into Anglo American culture and discarding the culture of their families (she put a dunce cap on Rebecca for speaking Yiddish in an earlier book); it was even required of teachers to abide by such standards.

Kit (1934)

• Kit's reaction upon seeing her father in the bread line at the soup kitchen.
• In her movie, Kit's reaction to Dad leaving for Chicago. Special mention to her line, "We're not okay if we're not together."
• Stirling, in the 2nd book, admits he knows his father has "flown the coop". It hurts a lot in the movie, where he's not only pretending to keep a smile on his face, he gives his life savings to his mother with the mail, forging his father's handwriting, to convince her that it's from his father and he might come back. He only admits later to Kit that he was the one who sent the letter and money and he knows his dad's gone for good.
• In Happy Birthday, Kit!, Kit tells her friends to keep her desire for a birthday party (especially a Robin Hood themed one) a secret because she feels she shouldn't be expecting a party or a celebration at all because her parents are struggling to keep the house and put bread on the table. It's really sad to see how financial struggles can impact a kid.
  • Later when her no-nonsense and frugal Aunt Millie comes to visit Kit at school with the announcement that they'll be throwing a birthday party for her with a "Penny Pincher" theme, the young girl is embarrassed when her peers find it all amusing and even laugh at her aunt's appearance. Kit ends up voicing her frustrations at her aunt.
    • From Aunt Millie's perspective: you come to visit your adopted son and his family who has been recently struggling with money, by providing solutions that help what the household economics only to be dealing with the pre-teenage girl who is rather embarrassed by her situation and a daughter-in-law from a wealthy family that finds it all "countrified".

Nanea (1941)

• The whole of what happens in post-attack Hawaii in the Nanea stories:
  • Her dog Mele gets lost for several days. And the dog was even traumatized and didn't want to leave her after being found. Nanea is later made anxious by the prospect of having to sign her up for military duty.
  • Her Uncle Fudge (of Japanese descent) is jailed for a duration of time and amongst other Japanese men (like a barber and Reverend). This affects his daughter Lily, who gets rather prickly at her good friends.
  • One of her neighbors has bullet holes from after the attack (either friendly fire or maybe from the planes).
  • Nanea's friend Donna is shipped out to the mainland with her mother as they are "nonessential" personnel while her journalist father stays on the island.
  • Nanea and her mother and sister fear for the brother and fathers' safety when they go out to help at their jobs during the attack.
  • Vehicles on the road shot at, a roof ripped off some homes, a section of Nanea's school has been damaged by a fire that affected several mom-and-pop shops.
  • From the point of view of families: many of the young men have enlisted to the army. More tragedy to come.
  • Hawaii under martial law with closed movie theaters, schools out for two months, and barbed wire at the beach.
  • Anti-Japanese prejudices coming out with Lily's brother Gene getting soap writing on his car spelling out "Go Home Jap" and later, Lily getting a racial slur slung at her by a passer-by while walking home from the local crack seed shop with Nanea.
• Nanea gets interviewed by a reporter named Gwenfread Allen, who writes that Nanea fears every air raid drill is "the real McCoy" and how children are affected by a war that they didn't even start.
• A neighbor of Nanea not only lost her belongings in a house fire, she even lost her husband in the attack and now has to be the only parent for her newborn son.
• Dixie's story: her Mother left the family for Hollywood when she was five years old, her dad's job gets them transferred to Oahu from Maui where because of housing shortage they have to live with her maternal aunt, her aunt's home is filled with three little kids who keep her up, she looks at her aunt and sees a huge reminder of her Mother, she comes to school and spends most of her recess sleeping to catch up on the sleep she lost the night before.
• Nanea frets over the prospect of losing her dog and brother to the war: the former to "Dogs for Defense" and the latter by enlisting in the war as soon as he turns 18. The entire Mitchell household gets tense at the idea of David enlisting, which is a real possibility throughout the series; the reader can sense the anxiety through the pages, and it all comes to a head when he doesn't enlist on his birthday... but comes home a few days later announcing that he's joined up after all.
• Donna reports that her two new friends, the first ones to greet her when she moved to San Francisco, were taken to internment camps due to their Japanese heritages.

Molly (1944)

• Molly's reaction in the movie when her father announces he's shipping out to England to help in the war effort. She's terrified, she knows a man doesn't need to fight to be hurt or worse, and to add to the gloom it's raining the day he leaves. Molly's in tears as she watches the train pull away, and the next scenes show her quiet and deep in thought as her friends prattle about Betty Grable and her siblings laugh at their favorite show.
• In the film adaptation of Molly's books, there's a scene where Molly comes home from school and unexpectedly finds her mother instead of their housesitting neighbor Mrs. Gilford. It turned out Mrs. Gilford wasn't there because she'd just received word that her son was killed in battle. Having recalled how proud Mrs. Gilford was when she talked about her son serving, it quickly dawns on a horrified Molly as to why her mother is there and can only desperately beg her mother not to tell her that Johnny Gilford is dead. She then goes to deliver a casserole to Mrs. Gilford. When she opens the door, the woman takes a moment to thank Molly before she breaks down in tears and hugs the girl out of grief.
• Molly mentions in the last book that her teacher's fiance was killed overseas, but it's especially painful in the movie adaptation. No words are needed; the spelling bee is quietly interrupted, with the kids wondering what's going on, the messenger whispers in Miss Campbell's ear, and she begins to sob and is led off the stage as the MC stammers that the ending will have to be postponed.
• Emily shares how her dog was killed in a bombing. Again, something made more painful in the movie, where her mother was killed in this version: she breaks down after confessing the real story of her life and tells Molly (who already knew) how much she loved her mother and what happened to her, but can't bring herself to finish.
  • Emily's whole story: as Mrs. McIntire put it, Emily has seen her country at war since she was five years old and thus had to witness bombings. There was even a time where Emily had to stay in the subway of London during an air raid without her parents, and some buildings would be there one day and gone the next. She is then shipped out to a foreign country where she only has one relative, and that relative is sick and has entrusted her neighbors to take care of her.
• The Light in the Cellar
  • The nurse Marta's backstory: she and her Jewish husband were members of the Polish Resistance and he was captured and killed by the Nazis, she then had to take their small daughter Ruth overseas to the United States where she struggles to find a place to live and make a living due to her status of being foreign-born and the common prejudices held by most White Americans in the 1940s. It's a relief when she gets both a place to live and another job when a lonely wealthy widow hires her and lets her live in the groundskeeper's apartment at the mansion.
  • Molly's bitter feelings about Emily going off to live with her Aunt Primrose without much of a whimper, Emily lets her know that she enjoyed her time with her family and hopes to remain friends but it's sad to see how Molly fears the worst.
  • Ricky's sexist attitudes (along with his friend David), while common with men from his generation and often depicted more light-hearted, are extremely painful as he shows no respect for the intellects and capabilities of his younger sister and her friends (or even their older sister Jill's authority, who is in charge while their mother is away and turns into a nasty argument between the two). The worst of it is that it's implied that Molly's friends have internalized these attitudes and it nearly impedes their role in solving a case they worked hard on, only to let Ricky and David take all the credit.

Maryellen (1954)

• When you think of it, from an adult perspective, Maryellen's mother Kay gave up a potential future after being a Rosie the riveter during World War II, only to give it up when she saw that her fellow female peers at work weren't given the same opportunity or they were being fired due to Stay in the Kitchen attitudes. While it was a selfless sacrifice on her part, she's clearly frustrated with her role as a stay-at-home mother of several children and yearning for the excitement and challenges that her former job brought her.
• In The Runaway, Scooter being lost (actually kidnapped for experiment along with other pets) is this, especially when Maryellen discovers him huddled in his lonesome. Fridge Horror is that back then there were no laws preventing even the kidnapping of domesticated pets for these experiments.

Melody (1964)

• How the news of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing affects the characters in-universe, even if they aren't directly affected by the tragedy. Melody soon loses her voice at her church. The way she thinks of the killed girls and how they were around her age (and may have even looked like her and her close friends) just wants to make you cocoon the girl for safety. This one hurt a lot of people who are usually stone walls—in part because while things in the other series may just be happening to fictional characters representing what the time was like and loosely touch on most historical events, the Sixteenth Street Church bombing actually happened and those girls really died.
  • To add to this, the first time she goes to church again after losing her voice, she has a panic attack.
• Later that year, in between the books, John F. Kennedy was shot and the young people in Melody's world have to reconcile themselves with a world where hateful zealots blow up little girls and shoot presidents.
• The absence of Melody's brother Dwayne is felt, as he followed his dream of becoming a Motown singer against the wishes of his parents (especially their father), on Melody's 10th birthday (also New Year's Day).
• Melody's cousin Val's family has moved into Detroit for better and more equal opportunities but they have a hard time finding a house to buy because of racial discrimination in real estate. It pretty much breaks Val when the girls discuss making a difference in their community and she comments she isn't part of the community yet.

  How can I be? We don't even have a house of our own.

Julie (1974)

• Julie's feelings about having to move between her parents' homes, especially when it came to her pet rabbit at her father's, and her own misgivings about being open about her parents having been divorced.
• Ivy's knee-jerk reaction to her mother bringing home takeout from her grandparents' restaurant yet again, where she said "I'm tired of Chinese food", only to find out her grandparents were there, was quite distressing for her.

Courtney (1986)

• Courtney witnesses the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger live, which rattles her and many schoolchildren who witnessed the live launch. Much like the Sixteenth Street Church bombing in Melody's series, the disaster actually happened.
• Tina discussing her late mother Bonnie, and how it never felt real that she was dead until her father Mike married Courtney's mother Maureen — and that at that point, she could no longer deny her mother was gone and never coming back.

Other

• One of the short stories featured in the magazine, "Sheba Lee," is about a girl named Sheba Lee with No Social Skills. Every year, she tries to befriend a new group of girls by copying them, without much success. In fifth grade, she chooses the narrator and her best friend Karina, and joins their ballet class. They tolerate her until Karina can't find her necklace and accuses Sheba Lee of stealing it, turning everyone against her. It's only after Sheba Lee ends up leaving the class that Karina finds the necklace in her gym bag, but they don't know how to apologize to her. They write an apology letter to her, and as they go to drop it in a public mailbox, they see her walking down the street with new friends, who she seems to be genuinely happy with.
• A few of the examples of friendship problems in A Smart Girl's Guide to Friendship Troubles can be sobering, especially if you have experienced something similar.
  • Lydia's big brother Randy gets into an accident and is paralyzed from the waist down. She is so devastated that she starts relying on her friend group more for support. Instead of being there for her, they kick her out of the group, even writing a list of "annoying things about Lydia" and giving it to her.
  • Jenna and Cami are best friends, but when Jenna starts making other friends, Cami starts flip-flopping between being nice and being mean to her, for no apparent reason. Jenna is so stressed out that she starts throwing up in the morning. Eventually, it gets to a point where Jenna realizes she can't keep being best friends with Cami, even though she wants to, because it's wrecking her mental health.