My affection for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books is unbounded and enduring. There were the first real books I read for myself as a child and the stories and illustrations formed the backbone of my lifelong joy in books and a good story. I read them endlessly as a girl, took a bit of a break as a teenager, but returned to them in my 20s. I read a few of them each year, picking up one or another as one would make plans to see a good friend. I’ve also read everything else about the Ingalls family that I can find. From Laura’s newspaper columns to the writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, to dozens and dozens of more serious historical understandings of Laura’s life and experiences, I’ve devoured it all.
Because of that deep interest, I know that while Laura based her children’s stories on her life as a pioneer girl, some of what she wrote was only a shard of the truth of her life and family. The historian in me understands that the Little House books are both an artifact of their time (they were originally written in the 1930s and 1940s) as well as the post-Civil War America they sought to chronicle. I know that the story of the Ingalls family that Wilder chose to share was a sanitized version of her past. As a child, I loved the idea that these stories were “true.” As an adult, I see that a child’s “true” is much different than an adult’s. The distinctions and contradictions in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories don’t bother me so much as engage my inner historian. No better the truths, there are enduring stories and lessons told in Wilder’s novels about Laura and her family. Those stories have shaped my life.
From Laura’s books, I learned so much. I knew the beauty of the prairie before I even set foot in Nebraska. Even when life in the rural Midwest was a challenge, I had learned to love and appreciate the landscape. I learned to appreciate the hardships and hard work of the pioneer settlers who headed west to find land and opportunity. I learned to take pleasure in things made by hand and created by hard work. I learned the power of Mother Nature. I learned the value of kindness and saw the value of patience and grace well before I was able to consistently practice those traits on my own.
This last lesson came from Ma, Laura’s mother, Caroline, who is a prominent in all of Wilder’s stories. Read from a child’s point of view, Wilder’s books seem to celebrate her father. As an adult, reading Wilder’s series for my own pleasure and later to my son as he was growing up, it is Laura’s mother, Caroline, known as Ma, who stands out. She is notable for her patience and grace, for her steadfast care and nurturing of her family, and for a resilience that is really quite remarkable. From her, I understood the power behind such ideas such as “least said, soonest mended” and “what can’t be changed must be endured.” No matter the hardship, Ma turned toward the light. I respect that about her.
When I first learned about Sarah Miller’s book, Caroline, I knew that I would read it. Miller traces the events that Wilder outlined in her second Little House book, Little House on the Prairie, but tells the story entirely from Caroline’s point of view. The book is simply dazzling, both for the power of the author’s words and for her ability to imagine Caroline, a character at once familiar and still mysterious to her readers.
It’s a tricky task to tell a well-known story from a different point of view, but Miller does it well. She works with the contours of the Little House on the Prairie story that Laura told, gently inserting historical truths. As was the case with Wilder’s books for children, Miller’s book is about a close-knit pioneer family. It is about resilience and hard work; love and family.
This book was my first read of 2019 and it set the bar high. It was a treat to return to the world of the Ingalls family. It will join my collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, a story that I will return to again and again. That’s the highest complement I can pay a book.
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