Laura, Pioneer Girl

Today is the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the much-loved Little House books about her life as a little girl and a young woman in the days during which Americans pushed further and further West. I love these books. They are complicated on many, many levels, from ethics to physics...and are always capable of making me remember how much harder day to day life could be. The Lone Star Girl received a boxed set of all of the Little House books, from Little House In The Big Woods to The First Four Years, from Santa Claus on the Christmas that she was four. They were the books that I read to her in bed at night that year. The Lone Star Girl had a precocious attention span for long books so, considering that Laura was four in the first book, I thought we would make it through a few and save the rest for later. The Lone Star Girl had a different plan, however, and insisted that we continue reading until we had finished all of them, even the one in which Laura was grown and struggling with marriage. I had to edit my reading of a number of parts due to violence and inappropriate material for a four-year-old but most of the content was fine. I am a character/relationship reader mostly, so my brain would go on auto-pilot when I was reading the long descriptions of how to make a well or a straw hat or whatever, but the Lone Star Girl would pull me up short with specific questions on the mechanics of what I had just read and I would have to read it to myself again and figure out how to reply... it was educational for both of us. Strangely, the Lone Star Girl's favorite was The Long Winter, easily my least favorite as it was muy depressing, if very well done. The Lone Star Girl read a few of the Rose books, written by someone else, when she was older, and enjoyed them, but not enough to finish that series, as she had insisted upon with the ones by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One thing besides her wonderful books that I love about Laura Ingalls Wilder is that she did not write her first book until she was 63 years old. That makes me feel like I am not getting such a slow start on my book-writing career after all! Fans of the series might enjoy another book that the Lone Star Girl and I read, Searching for Laura Ingalls, by Christopher Knight, about a modern-day little girl who visits the childhood places of her literary heroine. It has gorgeous photographs.