I didn’t read the Little House books growing up (I was more of a Wayside kid), and the little of the story I know outside of pop culture comes from overhearing snippets my wife read to our daughter. I assume this makes me something of an atypical reader of Prairie Fires. In truth, my interest was mainly in the time and place where the books were set, and I picked up Prairie Fires expecting it to expand on the historical context of the American Frontier. It did do that to an extent, though Laura’s frontier years comprise at most 1/3 of the book. The rest splits in focus between Laura and her daughter Rose. Had I known this going in, I may have been less inclined to begin the book in the first place.
I’m glad I didn’t know it, though, because the Rose Wilder Lane is a fascinating—if infuriating—personality. Though largely forgotten now as anything other than the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Lane was a formidable author in her own right. Prodigious and unscrupulous, she wrote biographies of famous men with only cursory research, leaning in to speculation and outright invention without the slightest shame. Her stories sold to major magazines for alarming sums, yet whatever money she made she got rid of so fast it was almost as if she were allergic to it. Aggressively giving and resentful, her mother’s keeper and dependent, she is a study of contradictions. I’d be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of personality disorder.
Devotees of Little House will likely enjoy the details of how the books were revised, and the symbiotic amalgam of mother and daughter that forged them. I enjoyed it too, though mostly I liked reading about these two very strange, not entirely likeable, but inarguably influential women. Fraser wrote neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but painted an honest, thoughtful, unflinching portrait. Her prose is excellent, lightly adorned where useful but not overly florid, rich in detail and context.
I greatly enjoyed this book, and might even pick up some of the Little House books now.