The "Lost" Little House Years: Old Town in the Green Groves by Cynthia Rylant

Generations of American children have lived the pioneer years with the Ingalls family in Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical novels Little House series, but few are aware that Wilder altered the chronology of her books to omit the two years between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake.

Perhaps the time spent in the long-settled town of Burr Oak, Iowa, did not fit her general theme of westward pioneering, or perhaps those years, with four moves to rented quarters and the death of the family's long-awaited baby boy, Charles Frederick, made the period too painful to revisit. Although Wilder left notes on this time, there is no clear evidence that she ever contemplated making the manuscript into a novel. Thus the broken thread of the Little House narrative was left to be mended by Newbery Award author Cynthia Rylant over a half century later in her Old Town in the Green Groves.

Times are very hard at the little house on Plum Creek. A plague of grasshoppers has destroyed their summer crop, and the Ingalls family is forced to move to a rented house in the new town of Walnut Grove where Charles Ingalls can hire out to work off their rising debt. But when the family returns to their farm in the spring, their new crop is again visited by the voracious insects. With much debt and no income, Charles Ingalls is forced to sell the farm, pack up the wagon with their possessions, and find work in the settled lands to the south and east.

After a summer stay working on Uncle Peter Ingalls' farm, where they sadly bury their frail baby, the Ingalls move to Iowa, where Ma's and Pa's work in a hotel earn the family a cramped little room and board at the hotel's table. Laura, Mary, and Grace happily enroll at the town school, and Laura makes her first close friend while the family moves again, first to three "sweet, clean" rooms above a store, and then to a real house, where baby Grace is born. The novel ends in a surprise departure from Burr Oak to move west again, with the familiar carved shelf and china shepherdess carefully packed away and Jack taking his favorite westwarding position beneath the covered wagon.

Rylant sticks close to the tone of the original novels, with vignettes of warm family life and much detail about life in the period. Rylant's Laura is less daring and tomboyish at her hands, but the genuine sweetness and resiliency of her personality shine through the more sedate ways of life in an "old town." Jim LaMarche's soft-focus pencil drawings mirror the charm of the classic Garth Williams illustrations well. Children who want to know Laura Ingalls' whole story will welcome this addendum to her story.