For the first time ever, the Girl of the Year from American Girl, Summer McKinny, is from Maryland. To mark this, a local news station in Maryland interviewed the community care and advocacy director with the Maryland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Katie Flory, who helped advise American Girl on Summer's story, for more details.
In this interview, it was revealed that Summer is from Maryland because the author of her books, Clare Hutton, is from Maryland, and her aunt Olivia lives in Fells Point, Maryland, which is a half hour from Columbia, where Summer lives. The interview also reveals that Katie Flory made sure Summer was walking a safe number of dogs, and even had them change a cat treat recipe to make it safer.
Flory said: "We wanted to make sure...they were small enough for the cat, maybe in the first part of the story, they were a little bigger than maybe what they should be for a cat. So we just wanted to make sure that anyone would be able to make them and provide them to that to that animal that might be in their home."
"When they contacted us, I really didn't know that they put this much effort and reality into it. It was really important to us that they weren't just making a doll for the sake of making a doll that she really is an American girl from our state."
I live in that area. Columbia is about 20-30 minutes from Baltimore depending on traffic.
they put a lot of care into her story! :)
thats actually really cool!
Interesting! Summer is American Girl’s first ever Maryland character. We finally get a state that has not been covered by a character before. Summer is revealed to be from Columbus, Maryland which I don’t remember if it was stated in the journal.