Reading for April: Sunshine Day

[kid_lit_fan]

For as long as I've been keeping track of my reading, April has been a month of not reading much, of getting behind on my self-imposed 100 books a year. This year, it was a month in which to catch up, a month to take advantage of the lengthening days and mostly-nice weather and go outside and read in the sun. As I searched for lyrics for a post

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

Hyperbole and a Half has a book?! I AM GOING TO AMAZON RIGHT NOW!!!

[kid_lit_fan]

I am so happy to have made sure one person (especially someone like you, whom I KNOW will get a lot out of it) knows about this book!

[anonymous]

That's really interesting about Silver Lake, and the editing that Rose did. I knew she had input, and having read some of Laura's farm writing I know it was rather flat and I'm sure Rose helped to make the books saleable (hurrah), but what bothers me about the letter is that, regardless of sexual content or any other kind of content, what on earth is Rose doing saying "XYZ didn't happen on the frontier" when she's talking to *someone who was there*?? Very bizarre. Was she just a young(er) person assuming her more modern world somehow negated Laura's own experience? I agree with some of Rose's comments about writing a book in 1938 for children, but I can't imagine where she got such arrogance on the subject of what Laura's life was like. (And in terms of their argument, hadn't Rose ever heard of the "wild West", or wasn't that phrase in use yet? The book emphasizes that the Ingalls were the very first settlers in the area, so unless the railroaders brought women with them, they might well have looked at Laura and Mary in the wrong way

[kid_lit_fan]

Thinking about it again, in light of your comment, I wonder if a small plot-point about how a girl only a year older than Laura was married was another not-so-subtle dig at Rose's idea that these hard-working, salt-of-the-earth men couldn't possibly have thought of Laura and Mary as women.