What a wonderful, complex book. Little House on the Prairie covers nearly a year when the Ingalls family left their home in Wisconsin to build a new house and life on the Indian territory plains of Kansas. The hardships and beauties of such a life are told vividly. Despite some critic's misgivings about Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter's editing input into the creation of the books, the autobiographical stories told here ring true, poignant, memorable and sad. Children will be reading and learning from this book for a hundred years.
How tragic and ridiculous it is that the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, has removed Wilder’s name from her own award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award - primarily due to a conversation in the book wherein a racist neighbor expresses a racist remark about Native Americans. These particular ALA justice warriors must believe the primary object of children's literature is to coddle, mollify, pamper and protect children from any viewpoint - even a fictionalized viewpoint - which doesn't make them feel good about their race/gender/age/whatever. History and our present reality is much more complex and nuanced, though, as today's children will soon realize when they enter the adult world. And then there's the true cliche, 'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.', which makes it very important for young readers to learn about past racial injustices.
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