I’ve been doing a lot of writing about Laura lately. On the one side I’m crafting various drafts of a press release about LauraPalooza. On the other, I’m creating reprint articles as well as working on myriad new articles for the next issue of the Homesteader. And I keep running up against the same issue: how to refer to Laura.

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.

Today I got an email from a friend. She knew about my Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession interest and she was holiday shopping for her niece. She asked me what would be a good age for someone to start reading the Little House books.

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?