Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was thirteen. But then she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood. It was this decision that ultimately sparked her desire to visit the places that inspired many of her childhood favorites, taking her on a journey that included stops in the Missouri of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Minnesota of Maud Hart Lovelace, the Massachusetts of Louisa May Alcott, and even the Canada of Lucy Maud Montgomery.

From Little Houses to Little Women reveals McCabe’s powerful connection to the characters and authors who inspired many generations of readers. Traveling with McCabe as she rediscovers the books that shaped her and ultimately helped her to forge her own path, readers will enjoy revisiting their own childhood favorites as well.

Excerpt

From the Prologue:

When my daughter was still a toddler and I was overwhelmed by the chores and errands and tasks of a single parent with a full-time job, I found myself reminiscing fondly about the books I’d read when I was young. Having a child made me miss my own childhood—not the miseries of forgotten homework or lost retainers or shifting friendships, but the joys of the uninterrupted hours that I spent reading.

Back then I’d floated across seamless surfaces of prose, absorbed in books without an eye on the clock or an ever-present guilt about neglected duties. Now, my job required heavy reading, but that was work, more like swimming: I had to be aware of each stroke, of the tricky rhythms of breath. I was tired of being tightly scheduled and hyper-organized. I was tired of being too busy to while away at least an occasional afternoon with a book. I just wanted to plop down and read for hours and hours.

From the Prologue:

When I started rereading children’s books, when I re-entered the lives in particular of favorite heroines, I found myself yearning to travel to the settings of those books. It was as if the tourist sites that had sprung up might be living manifestations of stories that I once loved, of stories that had once themselves seemed like physical locations, places to which I could escape. They were, for me, as real as real life. As with my original impulse to reread books, maybe my initial motivation for embarking on these travels had something to do with nostalgia. Maybe I was seeking to make literal the metaphorical experience of being lost in stories, of meeting again characters who had seemed three-dimensional, flesh and blood, like old, good friends, like a part of me.

From Chapter Four

The healing powers of girls’ book heroines, the dazzling competence of Pa Ingalls, combined anew in the character of Nancy Drew. Nothing fazed her. If someone at a neighboring table choked on raw steak, she paused from tracing clues to administer the Heimlich, add a delicious marinade to the meat, and fire up her portable grill to ensure that it was fully cooked. If Nancy’s boyfriend Ned discovered a message in Hieroglyphics, Nancy darted over to translate it—into French by way of Swahili. If her car overheated, Nancy purchased a new thermostat and installed it herself, substituting roadside sticks and rocks for more conventional tools. If Nancy’s slacks ripped while she was camping on a mountainside, she whipped out her sewing kit and stitched up a pair of new pants from tent cloth. So maybe these are exaggerations of Nancy’s prowess—but not by much.

Nancy was the original Barbie, thin and stylish and endlessly versatile, capable of assuming a new role with each new outfit, a short cultural leap to Newborn Baby Doctor Barbie, Aerospace Engineer Barbie, Sea World Trainer Barbie, and Beach Party Barbie. . . .[Nancy] was effortlessly attractive, kind, and skillful, and we were repeatedly told how modest she was, even though she was always introducing herself by saying things like, “I’m Nancy Drew. My father is Carson Drew, the attorney.” Those words smacked to me of privilege and entitlement, an expectation that everyone should have heard of and been impressed by her father.

Sharing her first name called attention to all that I could not live up to. In contrast to the young sleuth, I was shy and awkward, and my world felt out of my control. In real life, modesty and shyness came down to the same thing, rendering me invisible. Nancy got away with so much; it wasn’t fair. She observed the faint sound of crickets on a pirated recording and concluded that it had been made at Pudding Stone Lodge because you could hear crickets there at night. I railed at this ludicrous deduction: where couldn’t you hear crickets at night?

My concept of how the world worked, with God in his heaven, the righteous vindicated, and truth and justice prevailing, was beginning to erode.

From Chapter 11

“I can’t even count how many times I’ve read Little Women,” Aunt Shirley had said one day during our Laura Ingalls Wilder tour. We’d been sitting at a Formica table in a diner in De Smet, SD. A fan whirred in the window while I ate my usual grilled cheese sandwich and rippled potato chip lunch out of a red basket.

“Me neither,” Jody said, sipping her unsweetened ice tea, smugly, I thought. Jody was special. She had been named Jo after Jo March, which made me extremely jealous. Not only that, but she was once diagnosed with scarlet fever, such a cool, literary disease, the one that had led to the stroke that blinded Mary Ingalls and triggered the rheumatic fever that resulted in congestive heart failure in the case of Lizzie Alcott, the model for Little Women’s Beth. Of course, by the late twentieth century, Jody could just feel all literary, take some antibiotics, and be done with it.

. . . .Maybe it was wise that, that day in South Dakota, I kept quiet about my mixed feelings toward Little Women. As Aunt Shirley and Jody talked about it, I became exceptionally absorbed in peeling off the part of my bread that, placed too close to the pickle, was now stained green.

“Have you even read it?” Aunt Shirley turned her attention to me.

“Yes,” I answered in the most indignant tone I could muster.

“You didn’t like it, though.” Aunt Shirley dismissed me.

“I did, too,” I protested, but she and Jody shook their heads as if they had seen right through me.

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About the Author

Nancy McCabe is the author of four memoirs about travel, books, parenting, and adoption as well as the novel Following Disasters. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, and many other magazines and anthologies, including In Fact Books’ Oh Baby! True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love and McPherson and Company’s Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember their Fathers. Her work has received a Pushcart and been recognized on Notable lists in Best American anthologies six times.

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