Caroline
Books | Fiction / Historical / General
3.7
(96)
Sarah Miller
USA Today Bestseller!One of Refinery29's Best Reads of SeptemberIn this novel authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before—Caroline Ingalls, "Ma" in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books.In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and the warm bosom of her family, for a new life in Kansas Indian Territory. Packing what they can carry in their wagon, Caroline, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril.The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone, sickness tended without the aid of doctors, and babies birthed without the accustomed hands of mothers or sisters. But Caroline’s new world is also full of tender joys. In adapting to this strange new place and transforming a rough log house built by Charles’ hands into a home, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses.For more than eighty years, generations of readers have been enchanted by the adventures of the American frontier’s most famous child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books. Now, that familiar story is retold in this captivating tale of family, fidelity, hardship, love, and survival that vividly reimagines our past.
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Author
Sarah Miller
Pages
384
Publisher
HarperCollins
Published Date
2017-09-19
ISBN
0062685368 9780062685360
Community ReviewsSee all
"Like many mid-century kids, I grew up reading the "Little House" books and watching the tv series. While I loved mischievous Laura Ingalls and her Pa, Laura's mother Caroline left me cold due to her rigid attention to proper female behavior, her religiosity, and of course her virulent racism. <br/><br/>Sarah Miller attempts to redraw our portrait of Caroline by re-imagining the novel from her point of view, but also correcting some "misinterpretations" in the original book: (bombshell: the Osage Indians neither threatened to massacre the white settlers, nor were they responsible for the Ingalls family being forced to leave; they left due to unsettled debts.)<br/><br/>Miller's take is that Caroline's unruffled exterior masks a passionate love for her husband which enables her to calmly acquiesce to his many boneheaded decisions. The mutuality of their love blends into Charles physical connection to the land and to his music; in one beautifully erotic scene, Charles fiddle playing "opens her to this place" as she sees him "gazing at her in the same way he gazed at his fiddle strings. Delight bloomed all through her". (p 167)<br/><br/> Yet "Ma's" frustration is clear: "Always the scale of Charles' work dwarfed her own...to have a hand in fashioning something that would not be consumed, worn out, outgrown---something as grand as a house? To be able to lean against a solid wall for years to come and know that she had helped put it there? Caroline thrilled at the thought". (p174). She never feels quite equal to the mammoth tasks required of her; she cannot "imagine what kind of song anyone could make out of her. It would be akin to exalting something as commonplace as a quilt or a pan of milk". (p 176)<br/><br/>Readers who chafed along with Laura at the rules circumscribing women may feel a new kinship with Caroline in reading these passages, though remained troubled by her narrowness of spirit towards the original inhabitants of this beloved land."
Lesley Williams