My Review
A journey into nostalgia
If you could put your hands on copies of books you enjoyed as a child, would you reread them? Better still, if you could visit some of the settings for those books, would you? This is exactly what Nancy McCabe did when in 2007 she took her nine-year-old daughter with her on a trip that to those places. Since I love books as well as travel, I grabbed the chance to read and review Nancy McCabe’s From Little Houses to Little Women. I was not disappointed.
In this beautifully-written memoir, McCabe seamlessly compares her impressions of the Little House books and others she read as a child with her impressions of them as an adult while taking us on a journey of hundred-degree days, bugs, ticks and endless acres of prairie grass to retrace the footsteps of the books she grew up with. In doing so, McCabe debunks a lot of the myths that the average reader may have accepted as fact — that the Osage Indians simply left the land for the white settlers, and that Ma insisted that Laura wore sunbonnets, not as a fashion statement, but to prevent her from becoming “brown as Indians.”
McCabe also gives the reader glimpses into her childhood and how the books she read shaped her life and resulted in her becoming a writer. But she doesn’t stop there. Drawing upon references to passages in the books, McCabe gives her candid views on religion, politics, friendship and family relationships.
Although I found the very detailed accounts of the journey tedious at times, I kept on reading because in the midst of it would often spring up some piece of information that I found startling or relevant. I recommend this book to book lovers everywhere, especially those familiar with the books McCabe writes about and to those who would like to satisfy their nostalgic longing again and again. I have given this book four stars.
