1816 — Mayra Donnell

How important is the weather? Twelve year old Sarah, from the Province of Maine, is about to find out as she keeps her first diary during the extraordinary year of 1816. She writes of frozen apple blossoms in May, a snow storm in June and wearing a winter jacket to the Fourth of July picnic. Two hundred years later, New Englanders are still talking about that year and call it "1816 and darn near froze to death."