Pioneer Girl - Laura Ingalls Wilder

[goodreads]

Title: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 5/5
# pages: 400 pages
Date read: June, 2015

Pioneer Girl follows the Ingalls family's journey through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory sixteen years of travels, unforgettable experiences, and the everyday people who became immortal through Wilder's fiction. Using additional manuscripts, letters, photographs, newspapers, and other sources, award-winning Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill adds valuable context and leads readers through Wilder's growth as a writer. Do you think you know Laura? Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography will re-introduce you to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions.


The fact that it took me almost a month to read this is in no way an indication of what I thought of it, but simply due to its size and how RICH on details it is.

An absolute must for an fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is chock full of facts about the people, places and events that Laura write about in her autobiography, and provide an extremely interesting insight into her life. As a life-long lover of LIW's books, it was fascinating to see where the books correspond with real life, and where she added details or changed things around to make a better story. There's no doubt that the life of the real LIW was a lot harder than that of her fictional counterpart.

I'm not sure the book ever answered the question of why it was published now -- where has the manuscript been hiding all these years? But I may just have missed it, as I did only skim the prologue/foreword. No matter what, I'm glad it was published. It gave me a new appreciation of some of my all-time favourite comfort books.