Big Books in my Little Life

In the Little House series of books, Laura Ingalls Wilder told captivating stories of the hardships and triumphs of American settler life in the late 1800s, based on her family’s time in Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota.  The storytelling style was different to anything ten-year-old me had ever read.  Loving the character and voice of Laura, I vowed if I ever had a daughter, she’d be named Laura.*
 
From 1974, the stories gained a worldwide stage via the hit TV series Little House on the Prairie.   Yet most Australians have never read the books.  Until the 1980s, our childhood literary fare was heavily British-influenced.  Our schools, however, had to meet a homegrown quota; thus we were force-fed the best and worst of Australian literature.
 

                            
British kid-lit was a wholesome genre.  Just to re-affirm my worship of Enid Blyton, favourites were:


The Famous Five.
The Naughtiest Girl
Mallory Towers
The Five Find-Outers
The Faraway Tree Trilogy

I didn’t like The Secret Seven.  Controversially**  I didn’t like The Wishing Chair.  Other great Brit fantasy authors were Mary Stewart and Ursula Moray Williams.  If the masterpiece Harry Potter series had existed, I’d have been in heaven.

Brainwashed by British accents and magical forests and castles and boarding schools, I hated my first all-Australian novel, Storm Boy (Colin Thiele).   But! – here's the lesson: never discount a popular author on the strength of one book.  Weeks later, I devoured Thiele’s February Dragon as quickly as the raging bushfire ripped through its chapters.    

I recoiled at the silly title of our next Aussie ‘required text’ -  I Can Jump Puddles (Alan Marshall).  Yet once read, the true poignance of the title is revealed, and its mere mention will move you. 

Then at age ten, despite the best efforts of the education system, I discovered American junior literature.  Hello Trixie Belden!  Encyclopedia Brown!  Bring on Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time  and the wondrous coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Most brilliant of all: The Phantom Tollbooth.   And of course, the Little House books.

Wilder's simply-expressed wisdom stays with me.  Fans of the books will recall the devastation of Mary’s blindness; I found this line so affecting:

“Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.”

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*  A kind American friend, aware of the story behind my youngest daughter’s name, last week sent me a lovely package of Ingalls souvenirs, direct from Walnut Grove.  The memories prompted this post.
   
** everyone except me seems to love The Wishing Chair