It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, how many common experiences have never been described in fiction, even though they seem so obvious in retrospect. For instance, how many bookish girls have read the Little House series and desperately wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to be a brave and plucky pioneer girl and live in a log cabin or a hole in the ground and get to be around horses all the time and churn butter?
Since she’s got lots of time on her hands, and since she has mad research skills, Lee decides to investigate. Her quest takes her to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, where, weirdly, Rose Wilder Lane’s papers are stored (including an early draft of Little House in the Big Woods, also called “Pioneer Girl”); to Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura (with a lot of help from Rose) wrote the Little House books; and to San Francisco, where Rose lived as an adult.
