What do you think?

Me, I think Pa wouldn’t go for it. But that young cuss, Almanzo? As drawn to debt as he was? Maybe …

(I love how the writer is so obviously a fan of the books.)

Costumed volunteers will join our residential attendees for Wednesday nights ice cream social, and Julie Shrader, executive director of the Betsy-Tacy Society, is planning family activities for Friday morning, July 16, of the conference, to run concurrently with educator and craft workshops. In the works? A walking tour of Betsy’s neighborhood, with young Betsy escorting her new friend Laura around her town, storytelling, and other surprises.

Additionally, the Betsy-Tacy houses will be open for tours and other activities, including a visit from illustrator Cheryl Harness, on Saturday afternoon.

Betsy and Tacy, the two little girls at the heart of the series of books written by Mankato native Maud Hart Lovelace, were based on Maud and her childhood best friend, Bick. The two lived across the street from each other in Mankato, and these houses have been lovingly restored by the society. A third friend, known as Tib in the books, lived around the corner and down the street from Betsy and Tacy. Her childhood home is currently for sale, and the society hopes to purchase it.

The Betsy-Tacy books are all currently in print, and the final six books were recently reissued in new editions with forewards from famous fans of the books such as Anna Quindlen.

Since Maud wrote her books just after Laura wrote hers, Maud is said to have refused to read the Little House books in order to avoid any accusations of plagiarism. Both women wrote about young girls and women growing up in the Midwest. One story suggests that Maud, then living in California, waited until she was completely finished with the series, then went to her library to say, “NOW I can read the Wilder books.”

I can only hope she enjoyed them!

Join us in Deep Valley this summer.

The reviews are anonymous, but the name “Kirkus” is well known. And no doubt it rings a bell for Laura fans, because Virginia Kirkus, who founded Kirkus Reviews, edited Laura’s first books. She was the head of the children’s book division at Harper & Brothers.

I’d been planning on writing about the four children’s book editors involved with the Little House books in chronological order, but given the recent news I’ll start with Virginia Kirkus. She was really the second editor Laura and Rose worked with: the children’s editor at Knopf, Marion Fiery, had accepted the manuscript for Little House in the Big Woods. But just two months later, Knopf decided to close its children’s division.

It was 1931, after all, and hard times tend to be even harder for publishers, as perhaps you’ve noticed lately.  As Virginia Kirkus herself said in a 1953 essay in The Horn Book Magazine: “The ‘depression’ was making its impress on our sales; people were thinking that new books for children were unnecessary, while the old ones could serve.” But the children’s editors who still had jobs—like Kirkus at Harper—were nonetheless looking for new books, and her friend Marion Fiery told her about Laura’s manuscript.

The Biltmore Hotel

Kirkus wasn’t excited at first: “What I was told on the phone about the book failed to impress my interest. ‘An elderly lady was writing a true story—in fictional form—about her pioneer childhood.’ Well, I’d heard that tale before…” (As a children’s book editor I can attest that prospective books NEVER sound good over the phone. Don’t call; just send!)

Despite her lack of enthusiasm, Kirkus met Marion Fiery for tea at the Biltmore Hotel before catching the train home from Grand Central Station. She was convinced to take the manuscript home and make a decision by the following Monday. Apparently she started reading the manuscript right after her meeting.

You might already know what happens next, since it’s kind of a legend by now: Kirkus missed her train because she was so caught up in the story. And then when she got on a later train, she missed her regular stop.

(The current train schedules show it’s about an hour from Grand Central to Westport, Connecticut. Who wants to bet the sugaring dance chapter is to blame?)

At the time Kirkus was living what she called a “fairly rugged life,” in Connecticut, in a house lit by kerosene lamps and with only a pump in the kitchen; it was one reason why she found “Little House in the Woods” (as it was called at the time) so compelling.  “But the real magic was in the telling,” she wrote in her Horn Book essay. “Here was the book no depression could stop.”

Except, well, Harper & Brothers didn’t see it that way at first. Kirkus worked on Big Woods and Farmer Boy, and though the first book did well, the second one had needed work. In 1932, the books had yet to become a successful series, and Harper decided to cut back on its children’s books division. (Notice a recurring theme here? Ugh.) Kirkus was offered a job in another department until business improved, but she refused, and left the company. She didn’t have another job lined up. Instead, she started the Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service.

Kirkus claimed the idea came to her in the middle of the night: to provide book reviews not for newspapers or magazines, but for booksellers who were trying to decide which new books to order.  Bookselling is a tricky business in any economy, and Kirkus thought that an unbiased review bulletin would help both publishers and bookstores sell books.

For the plan to work, Kirkus had to read the books before they were published, while they were still in proofs. It’s now standard practice for publishers to send out galley proofs to reviewers in advance, but it wasn’t in 1933; Kirkus helped innovate the system and convinced publishers to participate. She had a knack at predicting which books would become successful—she was reportedly about 85% accurate.  Eventually she was reading more than 700 books a year.  Wonder how many more trains she missed.

Along with Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews was one of the two major prepublication review sources in the industry, so the loss to the book world is a significant one. If its influence hasn’t been as great in recent years, its range was still diverse, reviewing small press books that might otherwise be overlooked, and, of course, children’s books. As Horn Book editor Roger Sutton points out, Kirkus was the rare publication that gave equal consideration (and criticism) to books for adults and children.

There are rumors that Kirkus Reviews may yet find a new home; I would love to see them continue. Virigina Kirkus must have known that she’d been in the right place at the right time to give Little House in the Big Woods a chance, and she started her review bulletin because she felt there were other books that deserved to be discovered as well—books that needed to find the readers, booksellers and librarians who would champion them. Even in hard times, she understood, new books are necessary. Let’s hope that never changes.

UPDATE: As Sandra points out in the comments, there is now word that Kirkus Reviews will continue under new ownership. Wonderful news!

Links for further reading: A former owner of Kirkus Reviews reminisces at the Horn Book blog; more on Virginia Kirkus at Trundle Bed Tales; the Big Woods image comes from from an eBay listing for a gorgeous early edition currently for sale.

Skurnick has two Little House books in her online Fine Lines arsenal: Little House in the Big Woods and The Long Winter. Unfortunately, the link to the Big Woods column is broken [UPDATE: No, it's not! Thanks to reader Jim for supplying it], but The Long Winter, in which she draws comparisons between the book and today’s economic climate, still stands:

The Long Winter, for those of you who (shame!) never made it the entire way through the Little House series, picks up with the family when Laura is fourteen, and tells the story of an epic winter that strikes the tiny town of De Smet, South Dakota, nearly starving out all of its inhabitants. When I first picked up the book for a Fine Lines reread, I was quite sure that I’d be interested mostly in the domestic details of the Ingalls family …

Read the rest of it here.

So here’s my question to you — do you have any traditions, or are you hoping to start any new ones, that may give YOUR family a “Little House” Christmas? (It doesn’t have to be something directly related to Little House, although it certainly might be — but anything you’re including in your holiday celebrations to focus on simplicity, or on the true meaning of Christmas.)

I’m sure there are lots of wonderful ideas out there, and by sharing, maybe we’ll discover some new ideas we’d like to make part of our own Christmas!

See, I did it right there. I called her Laura. Way back when I began the Homesteader, I made it a style point to always refer to her as “Laura” rather than “Wilder,” even though that goes against newswriting convention. But I just can’t think of her as a surname. I’m not a Wilder fan; I’m a Laura fan. I don’t go to Wilder homesites; I go to Laura homesites. I don’t visit Wilder museums; I visit Laura museums. I may, however, be a Little House fan going to Little House homesites and visiting Little House museums. But when I have to refer to an actual person, it’s Laura every time. In fact, barred from saying just her first name, I’d probably opt for her full name, Laura Ingalls Wilder, rather than simply “Wilder.”

I wonder why this is. I’ve been pondering it, and best I can come up with is that I’m not talking about merely an author. She’s also a character, the character who stars in my very favorite books of all time. And then, just to complicate matters, that “character” grew up and out of the Little House books to live a long, rich life with her farmer beau and her pioneer past to draw from for stories. I can’t separate the character from the person. I can’t separate the author from the little girl in braids or from the teenager with bangs and long skirts that brush her shoetops.

I once saw a calling card that had belonged to Laura. The name on it was “Laura Wilder.” I remember being amused with how strange that seemed to me. She was this whole other person in so many ways — Laura Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mrs. AJ Wilder, Bessie, Mama Bess.

But she’ll always just be Laura to me.

Frankly, her question stumped me. In my case, the TV show came before the books; I didn’t even know there were books to base the show on until I read it on the TV credits when I was about nine. That Christmas, just before I turned ten, I got the first half of the series. A week later, on my birthday, I got the other half. The rest is pioneer history.

But I was rather old, wasn’t I? I know people who read them at eight and seven. My daughter, who reads more than I did as a kid (which I didn’t think was possible), finished the series just before her seventh birthday. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to a six-year-old. There’s a fine line between challenging reading and reading that’s so hard it becomes boring. So I wondered: what is the ideal age?

Those of us here at Beyond Little House represent a skewed sample. We’re all a bit more interested than the average slapped bear. In the general population, if you just want to expose a child to the books, what age is the “sweet spot”? Or on the other hand — this is just occurring to me–should they get them sooner and have them read aloud?

In the end, I told my friend age 7 or 8, depending on the reading level of her niece. But I’m not a children’s literature expert, nor do I play one at a Friday night literary. Was that what you would have said?

She notes that a friend wrote to her, trying to find something to be grateful for in a tough year. “We are in our usual health,” her friend wrote. And Laura, countering that thought, points out that good health itself should be welcomed with gratitude.

I think about her words often during this week of Thanksgiving. Every year, I use this time to reflect about the year past, to take stock of what I’m grateful for, and to show those I love how grateful I am for their presences in my life. In years past, before my paternal grandmother died, the entire Mattson clan gathered at this one time of the year. My father, uncles, cousins and others every year congregate at our family hunting cabin for deer hunting season this week in Douglas County, Wis., and while she lived, they all showed up on Thanksgiving morning, ready to help with the bounty coming from Grandma Elsie’s kitchen.

She passed away in 2001, and the family circle, in the natural way of such things, shrunk to the individual households of her sons, who in turn have large families. (At the time of her passing, we counted 67 descendants.) Still, there’s a reminiscence at this time, as the hunters return with their deer, and traditional foods come out of our kitchens. Grandma’s donuts, lefse, chocolate layer cake with date filling, and spinach dip often turn up. They’re somehow not quite the same, but we’re grateful to have a flavorful reminder of her on our Thanksgiving tables.

This year, my family will join my husband and I here, and they’ll stay for a few days. It will be a bustling horde of folks, eager to help in the kitchen, playing games in the living room, crafting in the basement. Nearly every age is represented in this crew, and love abounds where we gather for food, fun, and family.

I’m grateful.

This year, I’m simply thankful for my family and their presence in my life. I’m thankful that they all can come and join us here, and I’m grateful to have the means for hosting them. It’s been a rough year for many.

But as Laura points out again and again, we don’ t need much when we have family.

What are you thankful for?

I have seen some discussion — not much — regarding the stoicism of the Ingalls family. Laura speaks of it in letters to her daughter Rose during the writing of the series, and even says that with such difficult situations, one had to be stoic to survive.

But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone discuss to any extent the feelings of guilt and shame Laura feels throughout the series. Now, a counselor and mother discusses the Little House books from her perspective. I wish that she’d gone deeper into the issue of guilt and provided her thoughts on why Laura may have been like this, where those feelings of guilt may have stemmed from initially. (I see a lot of the same guilt feelings in Rose, for that matter.)

Read the discussion and come back here and share your thoughts on the issue! (Might I add I was finally glad to see a more balanced perspective of the Indians in Little House on the Prairie, recognizing the positives throughout the book along with the negatives.)