Pioneer Girl

Pioneer Girl took me a little longer to read than most books do.  It is a coffee table sized book in the hardcover format.  Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography that was published posthumously. I do not regret purchasing the hardcover with a young girl sitting in a field by the lake. However it is too large to be a book that I would bring to bed or on public transit.  One of the tasks in my Book Riot Read Harder Challenge is to read a book that was published posthumously and this motivated me to finally sit down and finish reading the book.

Little House in the Big Woods was the very first chapter book I read all by myself when I was in 1^st grade so Laura Ingalls Wilder holds a very dear place in my heart.   One of my first blog posts was about a woman who tried to emulate Laura’s lifestyle as a modern woman that I found quite amusing. Sometimes as an adult I do crave more mature twists on stories I loved as a child and Pioneer Girl fulfilled that craving.

The book weaves Laura’s autobiography together with historic annotations. Some of the details that were alluded to in the annotations does raise the issue of Laura’s memory versus actual historic fact as there were times that she simply got the name or the timeline wrong.  But she wrote this before the internet was ever invented and likely had no way of verifying these kinds of facts on her own. The historic details made a for a rich reading experience as a life long fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

While the Little House books were fictional books based on fact there were stories that never made it into the series. Frankly it was because of the more mature content. Some examples of this are when Laura witnesses a man abusing his wife and having a younger brother who died as an infant.  I was also rather excited to read in the appendix about Pa’s encounter with the Bloody Benders. They were a family of serial killers who lived in the same time as Laura did. I had just read Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie for the true crime part of my read harder challenge. I really loved the grittier stories that Laura shared.

She wanted to publish this book in her lifetime but had no luck getting a publisher to take it. While she did not live to see the success of this book I am so glad that it was published.  While I did have to be patient with myself to finally make the time to read Pioneer Girl making it through the book was a deeply rewarding experience as someone who associated the Little House series with fond memories of my youth.