Prairie Girl

My very favorite literary character and author is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have read every book many times and, if I believed in reincarnation, would think I once roamed the prairie in a covered wagon. We’re practically the same person. She was a brown-haired braid-wearer in a blonde-curls-are-better world. She was short, a bit round, willful, and tended toward a wild streak. She was a teacher, a writer, and spoke her mind (sometimes to her detriment). It all feels familiar for me, until we get to family composition. The Ingalls family had four children, like my family, but Laura’s three siblings were all girls and that doesn’t jive with my experience at all. But I feel like I understand a little of the sister bond from reading Laura’s books so often. Her dedication to and sacrifice for her sisters, particularly older sister Mary, are central themes in the series. In fact, Mary’s early and tragic loss of sight due to scarlet fever was the impetus for Laura’s writing career. When the sad diagnosis first came, Laura vowed to see the world for Mary, to be her eyes, and describe all that she saw in vivid detail. She wrote everything down on lined school tablets, and the rest is history. And literature. In Charlotte Zolotow’s Do You Know What I’ll Do?, a sister lists all the loving things she can think of to do for her beloved brother. We never again have any friends like the ones who share our parents.

http://www.amazon.com/Do-You-Know-What-Ill/dp/006027879X

http://www.charlottezolotow.com/