Primeros reseñadoresWendy McClure

When a childhood obsession is reawakened by a box of paperbacks found in her parents’ garage, Wendy McClure begins a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder—a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she’s never been yet somehow knows by heart. McClure retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family—looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. Both in her travels and at home in Chicago, she immerses herself in all things Little House—exploring the story from the facts to the fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual pageants held every summer in Laura’s hometowns. Whether she’s trying to churn her own butter in her city apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin somewhere in Kansas, McClure is constantly in pursuit of “the Laura experience,” and despite occasional disappointments (and too-tight corsets) she uncovers surprising windows into both the real past and the imaginary world of the novels. Along the way she meets an array of people who are similarly fascinated with Little House—from grown women playing dress-up in a sod house to the contestants of a Laura look-alike contest—and comes to understand how Wilder’s life and work has shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West. The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generation after generation of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones—and find that our old love has only deepened.