Book Review: Little House by Boston Bay

Book Review: Little House by Boston Bay

Author: Melissa Wiley

Date: 1999

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-440737-3

Length: 195 pages

Quote: “This Francis Scott Key is a fine poet. My hired man says folks have set it to music already—you know that old air ‘Anacreon in Heaven’?”

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote nine books about her early life. Although fictionalized enough to preserve people’s privacy (in real life there were six children, in the books only four), the books were based on facts. They were recommended to, and often enjoyed by, middle school readers partly because of their wealth of accurate historical detail. Eventually the books inspired the Little House on the Prairie TV series and enabled Mrs. Wilder’s nieces and nephews to preserve a family museum as a tourist attraction.

Nieces and nephews had to operate the museum, because Mrs. Wilder’s one daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had no children. Mrs. Lane did, however, bond with younger protegés, particularly with Roger Lea MacBride, who produced the TV series and later wrote his own series of stories based on the childhoods of Rose Wilder Lane, of Caroline Ingalls (Laura’s “Ma”), and of her mother and grandmother. Well ahead of their time, these women had learned to read at an early age and left enough letters and diaries to allow book-length reconstructions of their childhood memories.

The ancestor of Rose Wilder Lane who was a child when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a new song was Charlotte Tucker, born in 1809. In this book, she’s a little girl just starting school, much interested in songs, recipes, and war news...the kind of thing it takes to make a five-year-old’s sheltered little life into a book older children and adults will read.

As a fictional character Charlotte lacks some of the individuality Laura Ingalls Wilder was able to give herself and sister Mary, even when she wrote about them as five-year-olds. Wiley has, however, given her a thoroughly researched historical background. Her story is recommended to middle school readers who prefer their history dramatized rather than simply narrated.