On Ramona

I’m sorry, but Ramona is trite. Helen Hunt Jackson tried to do something interesting—she wanted to do for Native Americans what her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe did for enslaved peoples: bring attention to their plight in the hopes that policy could shift. However, unlike Stowe’s fascinating account of a handful of enslaved people from the same plantation, Jackson’s story is wooden and falls back entirely on stereotypes without any sense of humanity. While I liked Ramona a bit as a character in the first half of the book, she experienced little character development. Other characters, like the Señora and Alessandro, had nothing at all going for them. This is a tragic story, but from Jackson’s writing style, I couldn’t find enough interest to care. Unlike Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there is little question why this book has been forgotten outside of California.