Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski

I'm so familiar with Lois Lenski's drawings from the Betsy-Tacy books that I love oh so much. And we've checked out a good number of her children's picture books from the library over the years as well. But I didn't really know that she'd written chapter books of her own, and did it pretty darn well! This book was a Newbery winner from 1946, and is the story of a family living in northern Florida in the early 1900s at a time when it was still pretty much a frontier. It follows Birdie Boyer and her family who move into a new home, and their struggles to get their new farm planted and their fights with their neighbors over whether they can fence in their own land to keep the neighbors' pigs out of their crops. It reminded me of all the frontier type books (aka Little House and Caddie Woodlawn) although it has a distinctive Florida flavoring with talking about raising and selling strawberries, and it was definitely a cute story. I would be happy if my kids read all of these books--they are so wholesome and show kids working hard for their families and show what life was like for people not all that long ago. My only complaint is that the ending was really forced and sudden (the ongoing fight between the two neighbors is finished in one page when the truculent father of the neighboring family is suddenly converted by a traveling preacher), but that's okay. These books aren't really about the overarching story; they're more about each individual chapter and the smaller stories throughout each chapter.