Little House on the Children's Blizzard

Have you watched the Netflix reboot of Little House on the Prairie? I haven’t, although I’ve heard a lot about how ridiculously hot the actor playing Pa is. And how ridiculously pretty and sanitized the show looks, kind of leaning into the whole trad wife version of the prairie, I gather?

When I was little, I absolutely loved those books. Maybe they were the first historical novels I ever read and that’s why I write historical fiction. I still reread them now and then, but I also know that these books were heavily edited by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose, who had a definite agenda, which was mainly the supporting whole white manifest destiny version of the American west, instead of the much more complicated reality. And of course, they were written during a time when it was OK to be more than a little racist, and they are.

I also know that the conditions of life in the plains were much harsher than the books showed (even in The Long Winter) and I pitched an idea to my editor long ago about writing a book from Caroline’s perspective because I thought that Charles must have been EXHAUSTING, given how he uprooted his poor family time and time again and never seemed satisfied. My editor didn’t like the idea but then someone else wrote it and later she told me she regretted not letting me do it.

I remembered that a few years later when I pitched her the idea for the book that became The Children’s Blizzard. Maybe because she regretted not being on board for the Caroline book (and truth be told, there was a very anti-western feeling in publishing at the time), she was enthusiastic about this idea. So I wrote it, this novel about the real 1888 blizzard on the Great Plains during which so many school children died and young schoolteachers had to make life and death decisions in an instant. It’s also about the immigrant experience in America at the time.

When I was researching the book, that’s when I re-read the Little House books again, and I was particularly struck by a scene in These Happy Golden Years when Laura is boarding out to teach at a school and she wakes up in the middle of the night to find the wife of the household standing over her husband with a knife in her hand. This sequence is really out of place in the books—it’s so dark, compared to everything else—but it was key to my writing one of the characters in The Children’s Blizzard, a woman who is driven to near madness in large part because she’s been uprooted from her family by a restless husband and forced to live in this punishing environment. She’s the darkest character I’ve ever written and I absolutely love her, still. Because she represents to me the truth behind the stereotypically saintly “Ma Ingalls” character; women had no choice but to follow their foolish husbands, they were so often torn apart from their families and never saw them again as they accompanied their men out west. And very often, these women were driven mad; there are a lot of real diaries and letters out there that portray this.

Anyway – all this is to say that The Children’s Blizzard is my personal favorite among all my novels. Just what makes a novel a personal favorite is a mystery, I think. We authors love every book that we’ve written, of course. Especially while we’re writing them. But over time, we see things we couldn’t see while we were writing, and sometimes we’re a little disappointed in ourselves. But other times, we say, “Hot damn, I wrote the hell out of that book!”

And that’s what I think about The Children’s Blizzard. I’ll read some parts and I’m still stunned by them, like the point of view of a hawk the morning after the blizzard. Or the story arc of the character I just mentioned, Anna Pedersen, and also that of Gavin Woodson. I really pushed myself as an author with that one, it’s my most “literary” book (whatever that means), but it packs an emotional wallop along with bringing to light so many historical truths that were buried or sanitized along the way. I was influenced by my desire to show the “real” Little House on the Prairie, and by Willa Cather who wrote so brilliantly of that time and place, plus I loved writing such a natural adventure story. I pushed myself every day to come up with a new way to describe cold, snow, and wind—and that was a fun exercise! I’d never written much about nature in my previous books, and in this one the blizzard is as much of a character as the people it impacted, and it was just a tremendous amount of fun to write.

Plus, for the first time, I got to murder someone in a book.

TCB became my first sleeper success. When it was first launched in January of 2021, there was kind of a lot going on in the world. Pandemic, election, sedition, etc. We couldn’t go out to do events because of the pandemic, so everything was by Zoom, and that was very hit-or-miss in terms of reaching readers. Nobody was going out to bookstores. So you could safely say this novel was launched very quietly.

But in the ensuing years, it’s continued to sell. Almost every week when I look at all the sales stats, it’s my biggest seller. Except when I have a new book out, as I did with The Windsor Affair last month. For a few weeks that’s always leading the way, but then things settle down and good ol’ Children’s Blizzard retakes its top spot. It’s taught in some schools, which has helped. (It’s also really fun to stumble across some of these students’ book reports about the book, which can happen when you occasionally Google yourself.)

All this is kind of a ramble, isn’t it? Ah, well. Since I’m laid up with this foot fracture, a mental rambling is the only kind I can take these days!

But basically, if you like any version of Little House of the Prairie and haven’t read The Children’s Blizzard yet, maybe you will now.

I highly recommend it!