Rose Wilder Lane

A middle grade novel by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of beloved Little House author Laura Ingalls Wilder This middle grade novel is an excellent choice for tween readers in grades 7 to 8, especially during homeschooling. It's a fun way to keep your child entertained and engaged while not in the classroom. Newlyweds Molly and David are only sixteen and eighteen years old when they pack up their wagon and head west across the plains in search of a new homestead. At first their new life is full of promise: The wheat is high, the dugout is warm and cozy, and a new baby is born to share in their happiness. Then disaster strikes, and David must go east for the winter to find work. Molly is left alone with the baby--with nothing but her own courage to face the dangers of the harsh prairie winter.

The friendship between Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane began in 1920 in the publicity office of the American Red Cross in Paris and continued until Thompson's death in 1961. Although both women are today remembered primarily for their connections with others - Thompson as the wife of Sinclair Lewis and Lane as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the ""Little House"" books - each can be regarded as remarkable in her own right. Both women are described as having had a vital engagement with life that led them in fearless pursuit of experience. In 1939, Thompson appeared on the cover of ""Time"", which judged her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt among the influential women of the day. Typical of Lane were her travels through the mountains of Albania, the deserts of Syria and Soviet Georgia in the 1920s and her visit as a journalist to Vietnam in 1965 at the age of 78. The correspondence of these two women reveals their personal concerns, social ideas and political/economic philosophies and how they changed over time. Their letters tell the story of the first generation of women to come of age during the 20th century, as they tried to cope with problems that still face women today. Along with the letters themselves, Holtz has included annotations and footnotes that provide biographical information, as well as explaining personal and topical references.

In Old Home Town, Rose Wilder Lane has recreated small-town society of pre-World War I America with a precise feeling for decorum, dress, and kitchen dialogue. Like Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, she describes a community through the stories of certain memorable citizens. The overlay of nostalgia cannot hide some sharp observations about marriage and women's rights.

In the 1880s, when adventure lay in the conquest of the prairies, David Beaton and his bride came to Dakota to claim three hundred acres of grassland. Rose Wilder Lane tells of their struggle to survive with such force that Free Land has become a classic frontier novel. The young couple experience cyclones, droughts, and blizzards that isolate them for days in their sod shanty and endanger their livestock. The simple pleasures of home cooking, horse trading, and socializing interrupt work, here described in its wealth of variety. In every detail, Free Land comes to life because Lane grew up in the time and place of which she writes. The book embodies her belief that "living is never easy, that all human history is a record of achievement in disaster, and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit." Like the Beatons of this novel, Rose Wilder Lane's parents homesteaded in Dakota. Lane was a successful novelist and journalist when, in the 1930s, she encouraged and helped her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, to write the Little House on the Prairie books that were later dramatized for television.