Book Review: Prairie Fires

It has been years since I read the Little House on the Prairie book series. I loved them as a girl and probably read them through two or three times, at least. My mother gave me our set of books when I left home. I was aware of the friction between fictional and real elements to the story and knew they were pitched as a set of novels, but had never really explored a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder before. What an interesting life and story she lived. If parts of what she shared with the world were fictional, I'm not offended. I think the heart of her story communicates the reality of what she experienced.

For me, the most interesting and frustrating bits of this biography by Caroline Fraser centered on Laura's daughter, Rose. What an absurd and unscrupulous woman! Moreover, far too much time was devoted to Rose instead of Laura. Indeed, the relationship between Laura and Rose was intensely complicated and fraught with a give and pull of support and distance. However, I do think that Rose began life at a disadvantage. Even if she wasn't truly responsible for the fire that took her parents home when she was three, she believed herself responsible and that burden of guilt must have trailed her throughout her life (as evidenced in her constant need to build and establish new homes for herself and others). It was hard to follow the back and forth nature of their support of one another. Rose encouraged and edited Laura's writing, yet often inserted herself into the narrative process far more than she should have. Moreover, she had quite a tendency to overembellish the truth (in the celebrity biographies she wrote and in the autobiographical fiction she and her mother presented to the world). She sent money home to help support her parents, yet was often deeply in debt.

I appreciated how the author placed Laura and Rose in the context of history (when the Peshtigo and Hinckley fires were mentioned, I remembered one of my favorite reads in 2013, Under a Flaming Sky, by Daniel James Brown). It did seem at times as if the author had her own political agenda in the way she presented the history. Still, even though this book was lengthy, I was thoroughly pulled into the story of their lives. Indeed, I put this book down wanting to pick up Laura Ingalls Wilder's children's series all over again. Although I have quite a few other titles in the wings waiting to be read, I may try to fit the series in anyway.