K – Page 4 – Triple Take

Nebula Project: Rite of Passage

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Rite of Passage. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

In this 1968 winner, Mia Havero is a 12-year old girl living on ship carved into an asteroid, part of the remnants of the human race who escaped Earth prior to its destruction. In just two years, she faces the Trial, which all children living on the ship must go through. And many don’t live through. We follow her adventures growing up on the ship, losing and making friends, and training to help her survive the Trial. When she and a group of other 14 year olds are dropped off on a colonized planet, they face not only the elements, treacherous terrain, and wild animals, but the unknown colonists as well.

J: So, I was quite surprised to see this book on the list of Nebula award-winning novels! I’d read it in college and kind of thought it was one of those obscure little gems you find that hardly anyone else has heard of.

K: Well, obscure is right, at least from my perspective. But that doesn’t always mean very much when you’re not as familiar with parts of the genre. So I had never read this or even heard of it.

J: I couldn’t even tell you how I found it in the first place. It might’ve been one of those books referenced in old(ish) critical essays I was reading at the time. Or possibly by subject headings. From the, now-primitive, college library computer catalog. I had fun with that!

K: If I had heard of it I probably would have picked it up, solely for the novelty of a teenage girl protaganist.

J: Yea. To be honest, though I remembered I really, really liked it. I didn’t remember much. Just, obviously there was a rite of passage, and it took place in a generation ship. I was really surprised at the YA-ness of it on re-reading.

K: Yes, if this was published now it would instantly be plopped in the YA area, maybe with a head-chopped off girl on the cover, which would pretty much guarantee that at the very least hardly any adult males would read it.

J: And it would be a really hard sell to win the Nebula because of it.

K: Ghettoized as YA for girls.

J: Though I bet it would’ve sold really well, especially in the wake of The Hunger Games. Although then perhaps been compared unfavorably with it.

K: I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, but I know enough about them that they did spring to mind as a comparison point. And I can see why it might not compare favorably with a more recent book. It was very… mmm. It wasn’t _dated_ exactly, but it didn’t have the same feel as modern fiction.

J: Not to get off on a tangent — but you haven’t read The Hunger Games?! But I’ll tell you something I noticed that may have been why it felt dated? She explained. Everything. The details of going out on the surface of the ship. The details of constructing a log cabin. The details of soccer. Everything. Indiscriminately.

K: That’s true. There was no expectation that the audience would be familiar enough with these things to just imagine them without all this additional explanation. Though I have to say, the log cabin scene — he didn’t /quite/ plagiarize Laura Ingalls Wilder, but it was a damn close call.

J: I just started reading the Little House books for our other Triple Take reading, so I can definitely see that. On the one hand, it was neat she was treating ‘mundane’ things with equal weight as ‘oooh spacey things’, as you would do if you were living it. They’re all normal to you. But on the other hand, it can get dull and a bit.. ‘why are you telling me this?’ The details of soccer and of log cabin building, to /such/ a degree, were just not necessary.

K: Yeah, it was an odd choice. I can’t say I -minded- especially, but I also didn’t read those sections with as much attention as I probably could have.

J: You know I don’t mind those sorts of details when it’s.. for a purpose. Like if they were actually going to /use/ that cabin. I don’t think you’ve read him, but Steven Gould’s books are really big on planning and doing these sorts of things with lengthy descriptions. Sort of like reading Robinson Crusoe, from what I remember of Robinson Crusoe. If there’s an ulterior plan. ‘I am doing this to survive and improve my life’ sort of thing.

J: Oh, or Clan of the Cave Bear, which we talked about RL earlier.

J: Or even Little House for that matter!

K: Yeah. Exactly. The purpose of the details wasn’t at all clear to me. It didn’t illuminate the society any to tell us the rules of soccer, though it did tell me something that it was called soccer.

J: Oh, odd. I kind of thought he was Russian. Wikipedia says American and that his real name is actually Alexis. Which would’ve been interesting, because I see that as a female name. And his wife’s name is Cory, which I read the opposite way. So maybe he just didn’t think twice about calling it soccer. They do all seem to be speaking English. Though at least he showed a language shift on one colony.

K: Yeah, it is entirely possible that that wasn’t actually a considered choice in any way. Which would be disappointing.

J: Yes. Because he did seem to be trying to be global, at least in some ways. Though the main character.. what’s her name? I am so bad at character names unless they’re particularly memorable… is said to have Spanish and some other ancestry I don’t now remember. Italian? Indian? And her tutor has enough African ancestry to have a South African name.

J: Havero! Have Arrow. Mia was it?

J: See, he gave me a mnemonic and eventually I remembered. Which is actually an interesting parallel with The Hunger Games, which you unaccountably have not read.

K: The names were relatively diverse, yes. More diverse than I would have predicted, given the time period it was written. But like so many authors, even though he gave some thought to a) diversity of names, and b) a rough gender balance among the children, he fell down completely on part c) gender balance among the adult population.

J: Hrrrm. Yes, we see mostly men. And I did notice her survival trainer guy was male. And I was a little puzzled by the gender split when they were building the cabin.

J: They were about 13 when they did the cabin, right? So the boys wouldn’t have been taller than the girls, on average. It would’ve made more sense to me to assign tasks based on individuals. The stronger, the more physically fit, or just whoever showed aptitude after cutting down their first tree.

K: I was having trouble figuring out if the society was supposed to be egalitarian or not. On the argument for, they haven’t turned the women into baby making machines and they seem to have as much autonomy as men to go and do stuff. No one tells Mia she’s out of line for wanting to train for her desired job. Girls and boys appear to endure the exact same trial with no accomodations made for gender.

K: On the argument against, they distributed the cabin work by gender. And we see zero women in positions of authority. Toward the end, they even refer to the ‘men’ on the council. The only adult women we see are flaky (Mia’s mom, that woman who got pregnant) or rigid and annoying (That woman down in the engineering section.)

J: True. Rather like Harry Potter. Only moreso, since we don’t even see female teachers and nurses. Do you think he was concentrating so much on making the kids equal that he just wasn’t thinking whenever he needed to pull in an adult? He defaulted to male and didn’t undefault himself?

K: Probably. You know how annoyed I get though when people start defaulting to male all over the place. It only looks worse when they’ve gone to the trouble to make a female main character. It’s like they’re so busy congratulating themselves for being forward thinking and different that it completely falls apart everywhere else.

J: (I just had a moment of grave disappointment. I thought I had found and bought the sequel to this. But.. there is no sequel? What I have is a collection of short stories. A further disappointment is I thought this supposed sequel might’ve been cowritten with his wife and fixed some of the gender imbalance. Sigh. I’ll just have to imagine my own sequel, I guess.)

K: The collection of short stories contains several stories set in the same universe. And Mia and Jimmy show up very briefly in one. It’s not entirely a sequel.

J: Okay. That lessens the disappointment somewhat. :)

K: Did you read the intro by the way?

J: I did not read the intro.

K: He goes on a bit in there about how he decided deliberately to make the main character a girl. To be different.

J: Well, I can see that! Is that why he won the Nebula? A girl character was so shocking, new, and brilliant? The first since Podkayne of Mars?

K: Ha! You should definitely read the intro before you return the book. As it turns out, after he sold the original story, it was delayed for publication because of Podkayne running in the same magazine. And then he was afraid people would think he’d copied.

J: *snerk!* I thought Podkayne was older. Okay. I will read it.

J: So it was a short story first? Maybe the soccer and log cabin stuff was padding then. :P

K: Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what was the story and where the join came in but I suspect it may have been just the epilogue and a bit of the trial that was the original story.

K: He mentioned about needing to add additional information about ‘why they reacted as they did’ which I assume he means being the vote at the end.

J: Ah. I found it rather odd that they’d assume the next generation would react any differently.

K: Well, it has been typical of our society anyway to become more inclusive and accepting over time. I just was reading an article about it earlier, noting that all those anti gay marriage laws that were passed a few years ago were propelled in for the most part by people aged 50+. Which makes it much more difficult for the younger generation, who more generally favors legalizing same sex marriage, to actually implement it.

K: http://www.slate.com/id/2297897/

J: Yes, but he made a big point of saying how stagnant they are. How their art and their novels are mostly nonexistent and suck when they do exist.

K: Yeah. There were a lot of points being made, some of them contradictory in nature. That the people on the ships, the so called guardians of human knowledge, were so busy trying to preserve themselves and everything that they’d lost their essential humanness which is to change and grow. And a symptom was the complete loss of real creativity. But the colonists didn’t really seem to be doing much better, so it wasn’t like we were supposed to feel for them!

K: What bothered me the most was, I was totally unclear at the end – were just the colonists subjected to the punishment or was it the whole planet? Because they never did bother to find out if those aliens were sentient or not.

J: Yet Jimmy showed creativity when he wrote his ethics paper. So I don’t see what’s so special about art that all other forms of creativity aren’t also suffering. Are they improving their technology or aren’t they? I wasn’t too clear on that.

J: Good question. I don’t think they cared too much about the aliens, just as a ‘slavery is bad’ meme while at the same time not considering them human enough to count for anything.

K: I was pretty puzzled at the whole cultural stagnation thing myself. I can understand the point which was trying to be made, I just find it unlikely that the human imagination could be so very easily stifled as all that.

K: But part of what I think he was trying to say was, if you don’t feel any urgency, you don’t get things done. The people on the Ships lived for a really long time, so long that they didn’t really feel any urgency to accomplish much of anything.

J: You’d think they could’ve realized that and built-in counters to it. Like a rite of passage for 50 year olds. Create something awesome or die!!

K: Oh, but the adults would never have approved of that. It’s only the people who aren’t allowed to vote who can get so easily screwed over.

J: Heh.

K: I wasn’t sure if the whole clothing business was due to a lack of imagination (or maybe a male lapse) on the part of the author, or if it was deliberate, another sign of the Ships deteriorating creativity.

J: What clothing business?

K: When Mia is down on the planet for her trial, she sees some girls wearing dresses and apparently has never seen such things before, because she identifies them as something out of her experience. Which I find very odd, because even if the Ship has a small population, the names indicate it’s a /diverse/ population, or was to begin with. And fashion between cultures is very diverse. I find it hard to believe that no one on the ships ever wears a dress or dress-like item (sari? toga? sarong? kilt?).

K: This is a problem you see often in books, where one culture or group of people is given shorthand by having them always wear the exact same clothing every time they’re encountered. But it just reminds me of a cartoon, like Scooby-Doo, where they’re always drawn the same. It’s not realistic!

J: Ah. Okay. I guess I hadn’t considered it that deeply. I took it as ‘we don’t need to wear clothes because we’re in the perfect environment, but we do because it’s custom, sometimes, or something’. And so they wear what you might typically see an astronaut wearing. Shorts and a tshirt. Which probably makes more sense in zero gravity than other clothes. BUt of course they’re not in zero gravity. And they have wild parts of the ship where more clothes would be nice!

K: Right. That’s what we would wear all the time probably. Because frankly, I don’t enjoy picking out clothes. But I know that a lot of people do enjoy it and find it an expression of their personality. And we even see Mia going ‘shopping’ with her friend Helen, so they do give thought to looking nice and fashionable in their clothing. Which makes me think there must be trends and styles — I’m inclined here to blame Panshin for just not thinking it through all the way.

J: No art means no Teefury and Woot shirts!

K: Tim Gunn weeps.

J: The one thing I did remember about this book that I didn’t remember was _from_ this book (and I suspect a similar idea may appear in Asimov’s work somewhere as well) is Mia’s chosen profession of synthesist. It sounded so perfect. I wanted to be one when I grew up.

K: It was a very interesting profession. And so was ordinologist, which is described around the same time. But what baffled and annoyed me was the bizarre slam against librarians which came out at the same time. Because an ordinologist’s job /is/ library and information science, no two ways about it. Except Mia (and Panshin?) makes a point of saying it’s way beyond the librarian.

J: I can’t find a bio of him that lists any profession other than writer. I thought it’d be interesting if he was a librarian or anything that might shed light on that view of things. But probably he just had the typical picture of librarians. They can find things. But no thought given to /why/ they can find things, because they put them in a findable spot in the first place.

K: I don’t know. I find it hard to believe he could describe the profession so accurately without knowing what he was doing. I’m just not sure why he felt the need to give it another name altogether.

J: Libraries are girly. Ordinology is hard manly science.

J: I have one burning, burning question that I must ask you!

K: Shoot!

J: Why was the tiger purple?

K: It was purple? Good lord, I didn’t even notice.

J: It was totally purple!! Go ahead and look. I’ll wait. :)

K: Yep, it was purple. Reading the description, I get the impression they’re calling it ‘tiger’ but it’s just a word they may be using for any dangerous animal. It doesn’t even seem particularly cat-like.

J: It made me mistrust it was a ‘tiger’ as I knew it. It had a wedge-shaped head or face and that didn’t sound right for a tiger either, but other than that, it didn’t have much description.

K: Yeah. I have no idea what it’s actually meant to be, if anything.

J: And yet, in contrast, the planets seem exactly like Earth. These colonies have not been there long enough to be growing Earth trees all over the freaking place. There is not a thing described as /un/Earthlike, except for the aliens and the gravity.

K: True again. I wonder if this is something that we sort of ran into in some of the other books — the climate and composition of those planets wasn’t actually important to the point Panshin was trying to make, so he just took the easy way out and didn’t devote much time to thinking about them.

J: Ah to be a writer in the 60s, when you didn’t have to think about everything, just your central point. :)

K: Convenient that! But we’re almost out of the 60s now.

J: I was just noticing that myself! 70s, here we come!

Doubletake: Cold Magic (Kate Elliott)

The Plot
Catherine Hassi Barahal has been raised by her aunt and uncle after the accidental death of her parents when she was just a little girl. Now nearly twenty — considered the age of majority both legally and by society — she finds her ordered world turned on its head when a cold mage from one of the powerful mage houses arrives one night and claims the Barahal family is under obligation to let him marry their eldest daughter. Cat, older than her cousin Beatrice by just a couple months, finds herself abruptly wed to this arrogant stranger and carted off to Four Moons House and an unknown fate.

My Thoughts
First, some background: in the summer of 1996, I was doing an internship at Middlebury College. I didn’t know anyone, and I was feeling particularly antisocial that summer; it was not the best for networking during an internship, but conditions were perfect for consuming vast quantities of books. I spent quite a bit of time at the small bookshop in town, and every time I visited, my eyes were caught by a group of fat novels by Kate Elliott — the Jaran series. I’d pick them up, look at the covers, read the back copy, and then put them back without buying them, though somehow in the back of my mind I always felt that their eventual purchase was inevitable. And soon enough the day came that I could find no other more pressing books to buy, so purchase them I did.

I read them, and I enjoyed them quite a lot (though the later books not quite as much, as focus shifted to characters I cared for less), enough that Elliott was on my watch list as an author whose other books I would probably enjoy.

But for various reasons, though I’ve picked up others of her series, I’ve never actually read them through. Crown of Stars lost me with book 2’s horrific cover. And the giant Eagles of Spirit Gate — for some reason they just didn’t capture my imagination. So by the time the Spiritwalker trilogy’s first installment was released, I wasn’t sure how I would react. However, it passed the cover test, and I very much wanted to like it.

The story begins in the city of Adurnam on the southern coast of Britain. Geography is considerably different in this alternate Earth, but my best guess is that Adurnam is roughly near where Southampton is today. And that will be my last attempt to identify this world with our own, because though I am compelled to try and work out the differences, the differences here are not only vast, they involve a great deal of history with which I’m only marginally familiar. (I point again to the Strange Horizons review which goes further into the alternativeness of the timeline.) Some years ago, much of Europe was in flames as the result of a Napoleanic general, known as Camjiata. He was defeated and imprisoned and society has returned to a more even keel since, though there are hints of discontent stirring (once again?) among the lower classes. Adurnam in this world is a city which boasts a university and a growing industrial base, and is thus a place where the classes are often thrust into contact with one another. The Hassi Barahals, a branch of a larger clan, have a house here in a respectable neighborhood.

From here, the story takes quite a number of twists and turns which I, happily spoiler free, did not always anticipate or see coming. The first segment of the story involves Cat and her cousin Beatrice at the university, giving us an introduction to the way upper middle class society operates. But just when you start to think the plot might center around the school and a mystery surrounding people there, the story shifts: Andevai Diarisso Haranwy appears at the Barahal house, marries Catherine and then spirits her off in a carriage. We then follow them on their travels as they make their way back across the countryside to Four Moons House, where Andevai will report on the success of his mission(s). But just when you start to think the story might center around the journey (both literal and figurative) of two people whose pride prevents them from admitting they find each other attractive, the story shifts: we discover that Andevai has mucked up his assignment thanks to the cleverness of the elder Barahals and Cat’s world is overturned yet again.

There are several more shifts of this nature as the book progresses, and though I was able to predict a few things before they happened (a certain inevitable betrayal springs to mind) the plot remained for the most part delightfully unexpected. By the time we reach our climax and slope down to the point where this story ends, the reader can be both satisfied by the number of revelations made and tantalized by the questions left unanswered. Fortunately for everyone, the second book of the trilogy, Cold Fire, is due to be released in the fall, and Elliott has begun doing the spadework for the third, so at least in publishing time (if not so much in real time) there won’t be much of a wait.

In Short
After enjoying the Jaran books very much, I had been unable to recapture the same level of pleasure with Elliott’s subsequent series — until Cold Magic. This book, the first of a trilogy (… and dare we hope for additional visits to this world afterward? We are already promised a Rory-centric short story.) introduces an alternate Earth where history and climate has gone not quite as it did in our own. Catherine, the point of view character, is learning about the world much as we do while her previously sheltered life is exploded. She is likeable and, more importantly, intriguing, along with her entire supporting cast. I had borrowed this book from the library to read, which I thought a suitable caution after my inability to get into Crown of Stars or Crossroads, but I’ve already ordered a copy for myself and pre-ordered the second, which should say it all.

The Science of Doctor Who (Paul Parsons)

The Plot
Over the course of its long history, the science fiction series Doctor Who has presented any number of intriguing inventions, devices, technological advances and alien species. Scientist (and journalist) Paul Parsons takes a critical look at the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, the Cybermen and more and attempts to discover whether any of these things are actually plausible given what is currently known of physics and biology.

My Thoughts
Several years ago, I ran across a book titled The Physics of Star Trek. As a fan of Star Trek and of physics, it was obviously a required purchase, and so I did. The book took a close look at many of the technologies invented for the Star Trek universe — warp drive, transporters, holodecks, phasers and photon torpedoes — and evaluated their scientific plausibility based upon our current knowledge of physics and the universe. It was written at about the same level as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is to say requiring thought but not out of reach to the average reader.

There soon grew up a small industry around these types of books, as The Physics of Star Trek was followed by The Science of Star Wars, the Physics of Superheroes, The Science of Supervillains, the Physics of Christmas, The Science of Harry Potter — the list goes on. Inevitably (and yet, surprisingly late) the publishing forces landed upon Doctor Who and soon The Science of Doctor Who arrived.

As is perhaps understandable, given Parsons’ background as a science magazine editor, the book reads more as a series of separate articles than as a continuous whole. In all there are 35 different feature length essays, each focusing on a different point of the Whoiverse and bringing in information from scientific experts and science research to either support or discredit the possibility of that particular item/alien/ability ever being a reality.

The articles themselves are quite breezy and informative, definitely meant for the layperson without being excessively dumbed down. Understandably, some of the scientific explanations overlap considerably with those necessary for other series (black holes, wormholes, faster than light travel — those are pretty much science fiction staples at this point) but Parsons tries to put his own spin on them.

The main issue I ended up having with the book was that it was monotonous in its set-up. I think it would have worked a lot better as a monthly series in a magazine than it does collected in a book, because the structure of each chapter (aka article) is essentially the same: Parsons describes some element from the Whoiverse, such as an alien species, and mentions a few episodes in which they appeared. He poses a question about their existence or development, then brings in the opinions of one of the expert scientists, summarizing their findings. All of this takes 7-10 pages and then the article ends; on to the next topic. Though the articles themselves are loosely collected into ‘sections’ there’s no actual narrative thread that connects the parts of the section together; they could just as easily have been in a different order entirely.

The monotony might also have been alleviated somewhat had the stable of consulting scientists been larger. Or perhaps if the consulting sections had been woven together, it wouldn’t have been as obvious that the same person was being spoken to about multiple topics. Ditto the actual episodes which were referenced: while I’m sure Parsons did survey the whole of the Who canon before writing the book, there were several episodes of the series which were mentioned a lot. A lot.

Apart from my issues with how the book was organized, Parsons did a fine job selecting a wide variety of topics for coverage. A smattering of tech, of temporal and spatial phenomena, of alien beings: something for everyone. I can’t really complain at the choices, though I do think some of the science involved in thinking through the aliens was a wee bit thin. Also, if this book was really updated for the U.S. release, there should definitely have been a chapter about the Ood.

In Short
While I won’t go so far as to call this book a must read for any Doctor Who fan, it was definitely entertaining. I have no reason to question any of the scientific conclusions presented either. But I did feel like the information presented was a bit shallow, not just because so many different topics were covered, but because the coverage was so discrete. It was also noticeable by the end that certain ‘favorite’ episodes were referenced constantly rather than using a wider breadth of the series as source material. Additionally, though this version claims to have been updated for the U.S. release, it’s not really – Ten and Eleven are pretty much completely absent from its pages.

The Body at the Tower (Y.S. Lee)

The Plot
Mary Quinn was rescued at the age of twelve from the hangman’s noose by an enterprising group of women. Now educated and grown, she has been recruited by those same women to join a clandestine group of mercenary agents hired by Scotland Yard and other to investigate where official channels have turned up no results. Now a year on from her somewhat shakily executed first assignment, Mary’s latest case is a departure for even the Agency. Mary must disguise herself as a boy in order to infiltrate the building site at the Houses of Parliament and discover what she can about the suspicious death of a bricklayer.

My Thoughts
The Body at the Tower opens roughly a year after the events of the first Mary Quinn book, A Spy in the House. Mary is still working for the Agency, taking assignments and becoming more comfortable in her role as an investigator-slash-spy. Apparently, which I did not recall from the first book, she is not yet considered a full-fledged member of the Agency – though she is due for this promotion soon, as she’s slowly accumulated experience.

Mary’s latest assignment is one which is controversial within the Agency itself – she’s to go undercover at the building site of the Houses of Parliament, where they are working on completing St. Stephen’s Tower (what most people just call “Big Ben”). The building project is decades behind schedule, over-budget, and has been continually plagued by setbacks and bad-luck, leading to rumors of a curse or phantom. Certainly the latest incident, the death of a bricklayer, has not improved matters any. Scotland Yard wishes to know if the death was a suicide or homicide, so they have asked the Agency to investigate. Since the building site has zero opportunities for a female, Mary will have to disguise herself as a boy. It’s this latter step which creates friction between the two women who head the Agency – they disagree whether or not it’s a good idea to attempt expanding the business in this fashion.

In the meantime and hardly unexpectedly to the reader, James Easton has returned from his assignment in India and promptly finds himself tapped to perform his own audit of the building project. What saves this turn of events from being completely cliched is the fact that Easton does not return in health – in fact, he seems downright consumptive in the manner of the best Victorian heroines. (The official explanation is malaria; we’ll see if that turns out to be all it is.)

I found this second book in The Agency series to be much more brisk than the first – though Mary is no Sherlock, she is able to be a lot more proactive in this outing and eventually begins to piece things together. She finds herself on more even footing with Easton due to his physical weakness and her own increased confidence in her abilities, so their interactions are more interesting. And we’re introduced to a new character, the tabloid journalist Octavius Jones, who promises to be a nice addition to the cast, provided he shows up again!

My main concern, not of this book in particular, but of the series in general is that the books thus far have been fairly short. My fellow Tripletakers have noticed that many things which may have been quite interesting (Mary’s time at school, her time teaching, her training for the Agency) have been quickly glossed over or skipped entirely. Indeed, book 2 barely has time to return to the mysteries surrounding Mary’s father introduced in the first book. And – alarmingly – other reviews have referenced as fact that the Agency series was intended as a trilogy rather than an ongoing, open-ended (or simply longer) serial as I had initially supposed. I haven’t actually been able to confirm this at author Y.S. Lee’s website, but it seems to me that there is simply too much which needs to happen in book 3 to satisfactorily tie up all of the dangling threads. I fear being disappointed by the ending, so I rather hope book 3 is either considerably longer or not actually the end.

In Short
Now a more experienced investigator for the Agency, Mary Quinn’s second adventure moves along at a highly satisfactory pace. The setting and mystery are not at all similar to A Spy in the House, giving this book a different but still pleasing flavor. I’m left anticipating the third book in the series (The Traitor and the Tunnel), inexplicably (and aggravatingly!) due to be released in the US months after the UK edition arrives.

The Wilder Life (Wendy McClure)

The Plot
Author Wendy McClure immerses herself in the world of the Little House books after she rereads them as an adult. The tale of the Ingalls family gets a hold on her imagination and she begins her journey into “Laura World”, a strange place where doomsday religious extremists can bump up against East coast liberals and cheerful homeschooling families. Where fans of the television series and fans of the books have wildly divergent views of the same source material. Where the true facts of history occasionally conflict with the sometimes more persuasive reality of the books. She tries to get to the bottom of the books’ attraction and learn more about the real Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose life was softened and fictionalized for the Little House books.

My Thoughts
The timing of this book’s arrival could not have been more perfect from my perspective. Here at Tripletake we’ve been gearing up for a Little House bonanza in the second half of 2011 — we’re all to read the main series, some of us for the first time, and any of the peripheral books (some more real than the series, some less) we care to. So The Wilder Life was sure to set the right mood and prepare me to dive in.

I wasn’t wrong. This memoir/travelogue, which loosely follows McClure’s travels to a variety of the Ingalls-Wilder homestead sites, mirrored many of my own thoughts and feelings on the series exactly, and left me eager to reread not just the Little House books, but also much of the non-fiction literature that’s sprung up around them and their creator.

The book opens with McClure reminiscing on her childhood, her attraction to certain types of books, and her relationship with the Little House books in particular. So much of what she wrote was so similar to my own experiences, I spent a good portion of this chapter just nodding or laughing in agreement. To me, the Little House books were unusual in that I owned them – I’d gotten a complete boxed paperback set when I was 7 or 8 years old, around the same time I received a similar set of the Narnia books. Until I was in my teens, I actually owned very few books: there weren’t any bookstores very close to where we lived, I had no money, and I read too voraciously to support my habit that way anyhow. So there was the library. But the books I read from the library were different; they weren’t mine, and though I could always check them out again and again (and often did), it wasn’t entirely the same. And then there was the fact that Laura was “real”, an actual person who had once existed in the same ghostly, nebulous way as George Washington or Louisa May Alcott, and unlike the characters featured in most of my other books.

Like McClure, I also somehow missed out on the TV show for the most part. I believe I’m a few years younger than she, so my main memories of the show while it was still airing are of snippets from the later seasons, when things started to get crazy. When I think of Little House on the Prairie as a television show, my mind is filled with horrors: tornadoes, fires, dead babies. I was afraid of the show and even now it makes me tense when I happen to flip past it on some cable station. But though there are also terrible incidents in the books, they still retain a warm fuzzy feeling for me. And again like McClure, what sticks with me are some of the little things which sounded so exotic and fun – maple syrup on snow, braiding straw into hats, sewing quilts, smoking meat (the whole pig butchering scene, in fact, is made to sound incredibly fun and delicious, even though I’m sure I would be ill if confronted with it in real life).

I also never really thought about the fact that the places in these books were real and could be visited. To a little girl in New Hampshire, the midwest was remote, practically another planet. And even when I might have gone to visit quite easily — living in Minneapolis for two years — it never even occurred to me! For the last, I will always kick myself. (Aside: Similarly to the author’s partner, my own husband was not a Little House aficionado growing up. I suppose it’s because they’re not considered to be ‘boy’ books. But that is no excuse for being FROM WISCONSIN and having no idea that SO WAS LAURA. I’m still not over it.)

McClure finds herself drawn back in to “Laura World” after the death of her mother. Drawn back in a serious way, as she starts to research more about Laura’s real life, to read biographies and old journals and non-Little House writings. She does a huge amount of reading and research and old-timey experiments. Some of what she reveals I knew about (the Laura anime), some I’d heard of (Pioneer Girl, the original Laura draft memoir – I didn’t realize you could get a copy), and some shocked me (@halfpintingalls, a twitter account I’ve been following practically since it first appeared, is written by Wendy McClure).

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a biography, and though there is plenty of factual information about the Ingalls and Wilder family, that’s not the focus here. But the descriptions of the visits to the homestead sites are much more personal and thus more useful (at least to me) than any travel guide could be. I was especially intrigued by the visit to De Smet and the last of the Ingalls homesteads (Laura herself spent most of her adult life in Missouri, but as a Wilder). Sleeping outside in a covered wagon, even a fake one, sounded really fun. (Even after the misadventures.) I’ve had to stop myself from starting to plan a lengthy car trip vacation several times now.

In Short
I keep meditating on the book, trying to come up with something profound to say about it, but the fact is I simply enjoyed it a lot, and believe other people would, too. Especially anyone who was a little girl similar to myself. It reignited in me the desire to go visit these places at some point, and made me really excited to begin rereading the books as soon as possible. And I’ll definitely be trying some apples and onions in the near future.