First of all, a confession. I got the Little House on the Praire books, a yellow box set, for christmas 1981. I know this because my mother wrote my name, address, phone number, and date in each of the books. I was nine. I still have the books. They sit in their faded yellow box in a bookcase my Grandpa bought at a rummage sale sometime in the 50s. I don’t think I ever finished reading all the books.

I read most of them, and skimmed the rest at some point. The books just weren’t my thing. I found them a little boring. However, I loved the crap out of the TV show. I also loved the crap out of The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure.

Subtitled My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, the memoir is about McClure’s pilgrimage around the upper midwest (and New York at one point) to many of the places Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. McClure, who had recently lost her mother, was on a journey to re-capture the “Laura World” she imagined in her youth. A simple, more innocent time.

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