Old Town in the Green Grovesby Cynthia Rylant
Ms. Rylant, a Newbery Medal winner, has taken on the job to recreate the lost book of Laura Ingalls Wilder's family history, the saga that begins with Little House In the Big Woods and stops with The First Four Years. She attempts to tell of the years between Plum Creek and Silver Lake, when the family moved from Walnut Grove to Burr Oak and Pa worked briefly as a hotel manager and then as a feed mill operator. I assumed she gathered material from as many sources as she could--Laura's journals, letters, historical records.
She tried--I'll say that for her--but I would have rather read the journals. I devoured the facts avidly but her attempts at making stories out of them were feeble at best. And her occasional borrowing of phrases and expressions from the other books irritated the heck out of me. If those came straight out of Laura's journals, she should have recognized them and skipped them--once is enough, no matter how poetic the language. But if those phrases were borrowed from the other books, for shame. Be original.
Maybe it's my age--maybe as a kid I would have treasured this with the others--maybe possibly very likely. But maybe is the best I can say.
No comments:
Post a Comment