Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've loved the Little House books for 40 years, and eagerly read anything about Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was dying to get this book, checking it out from the library while waiting to get my copy. I won't be buying this book. An impressive amount of research went into the annotations, but this doesn't change the fact that "Pioneer Girl" was a terrible manuscript. It's easy to see why it was rejected by editors. Unlike the Little House books, it's written in a tone you'd expect to see in a boring letter. LIW's writing becomes more descriptive by pg. 158 ("Dakota Territory"). Imagine a fifth-grader writing a summary of all the Little House books--that's Pioneer Girl. For an author who boasted of her academic prowess in school, her grammar is poor, and she doesn't just make the occasional typo, but consistently makes glaring spelling errors; I think the poor woman went to her grave, never learning to spell the word mosquito (Misqueto?). Here is a prime example of how perfunctory and emotionless LIW's writing was. She describes an incident that occurred while she lived with a family to help care for a baby and its mother, Nannie, who was prone to fainting spells: "I hadn't stayed with Nannie very long when one night I waked [sic] from a sound sleep to find Will leaning over me. I could smell the whiskey on his breath. I sat up quickly. 'Is Nannie sick?' I asked. 'No,' he answered. 'Lie down and be still.' 'Go away quick,' I said, 'or I will scream for Nannie.' He went and the next day Ma said I could come home. Laura came that close to being raped, and this was all she wrote about it. She didn't convey one iota of dread or terror in that scene. This is how bad LIW's writing was, and I'm sorry to say that I'm now convinced that her daughter Rose was most likely the one who gave the Little House books the descriptive flair we've grown to love. Pioneer Girl ends just as poorly, with LIW writing the lyrics to several songs that the townspeople sang at the singing school. Talk about anti-climactic! The annotations are often fascinating, but many of them are unnecessary. In the age of the internet, readers really don't need long descriptions of the badger or Western mockingbird (complete with a photo). Far more interesting are the revelations of the interactions between Laura and her daughter Rose, as they worked on this story and her later children's books. There is far more detail about how the Ingalls family took Mary to doctors, hoping to save her sight. While the Little House stories were fictionalized accounts, these annotations reveal that many of the scenes were flat-out untrue. For instance, Pa didn't get lost and hide in a snow den, as in On The Banks Of Plum Creek. It was a man unknown to the Ingalls family, who got lost during a blizzard and died. Nellie Oleson (a composite of various mean girls from Laura's school days) did not flaunt a fur cape before Laura got one from the Christmas tree. Ma didn't object to Laura's helping Pa make hay, because Ma was also helping him with this task. And so on, ad nauseum. This book, which is supposed to be a thick slice of Americana, is printed in Canada. Many photos are small, yet there are large areas of blank white space which could have accomodated larger versions of these images. And the pages have a strong, unpleasant odor, rather than that pleasant "new book" scent. Most of "Pioneer Girl" was covered in the Little House books. Therefore, I would only recommend this book for the most die-hard Laura Ingalls Wilder fan.