Book #21: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I loved, loved, loved reading the Little House on the Prairie books when I was younger--and still do. I asked for Pioneer Girl for Christmas from my parents, without really even knowing what it was. Turns out it's Laura Ingalls Wilder's official autobiography that she wrote, which she tried to get published before she ever got into writing the novels in the Little House series. She used the stories and life history from Pioneer Girl to shape the children's books that she wrote. But, unlike what I thought before, the children's stories in Little House are not perfectly true to what really happened--they're fiction based on fact, not fact themselves. Wilder did a lot of reshaping and representing as she wrote the novels in order to make them work for her young audience, to make the chronology work appropriately, to make her characters sympathetic, and to give the entire series an overall feeling and plot of the family always moving westward and progressing to bigger and better things. This, Pioneer Girl, is the unedited and true-to-life autobiography that Laura Ingalls Wilder originally wrote. And it's accompanied by pages and pages of annotations explaining and expounding on the stories and people that Wilder mentions throughout her narrative. Almost all of it is already familiar to anyone who's read the Little House books, but the fascinating part of it all is reading where and how things were the same or different from what really happened to the novels, and to read about these characters that Laura meets and describes in the books and what happens to them in their real lives. I really enjoyed reading the annotations, even more than Wilder's autobiography itself--so much so that I think I am going to look up a biography of her to read. And I had so much fun re-reading the story that I'm going to revisit the Little House books now--I recently read the first two, so I already started On the Banks of Plum Creek. This was definitely worth a read and I felt like I got to know Laura herself better through reading it--although it is a HUGE book (not in number of pages, but in the size of the pages themselves) and kind of cumbersome and awkward to read.