The Wilder Life

Wendy McClure is on 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 to, yet somehow knows by heart. She traces 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. She immerses herself in all things Little House--exploring the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." The result is 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.