If You Want To LARP Little House You Should Just Do It

Actively homeschooling outside Laura's house in 2014!

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn't love it, but it gets 5 Stars from me because it's about Laura Ingalls Wilder. You evaluate your books the way you want, and I'll evaluate my books the way I want!

There’s a weird friction right off the bat in this book in which McClure states that she wants to immerse herself in the world of the Little House books, but enacts this desire partly by visiting the historical home sites of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and using that as the framing device of her narrative. It’s no surprise, then, that the friction never dissolves and McClure never really achieves the kind of closure she seems to seek, because the Little House books are fiction, and cannot be transcribed onto these factual places the way McClure seemed to want. It’s true that Wilder was extremely skilled at description, and that many (most?) of her descriptions are based on what she observed in her own life, but that doesn’t make the books biographies. And McClure kept choosing the most fact-based, “intellectual” and biographical activities like site tours and pioneer skills and feeling disappointed and disenchanted that they didn’t get her back into Laura’s “world,” rarely indulging in the thematic world-building activities like cosplay and LARPing, even though I think she’d have LOVED cosplay and LARPing if she’d just let herself relax. It’s kind of like the way she wanted to be a fan of the books didn’t mesh with the way she thought she “should” be a fan?

LARPing in a prairie bonnet at the Ingalls homestead in 2014

It would have been interesting if McClure had researched more about the types of fans that the Little House books attract, although just in her travels she did manage to suss out two types I’m also very familiar with: fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers and fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers. Those kinds of fandom are very analytically interesting, and I would have loved to have seen an analysis of why they each chose to pin their own ideals onto Laura. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing Laura did! Like yes, for the Doomsday preppers, at least, Laura’s later Libertarian leanings would probably appeal, but the preppers are fans not because of that, but because they fetishize the Manifest Destiny type of pioneer fiction that makes homesteading look easy. But umm, guys? It looks easy because it’s written for CHILDREN. That’s why all those weekend warrior preppers that so unnerved McClure kept going on and on about “canning” butter--”canning” butter (which I keep putting in irony quotes because if you actually eat “canned” butter you will get food poisoning) is a canning-adjacent craft project the same way that Fox News is a news-adjacent propaganda channel. It’s brainless and ineffective but it’s easy and looks great, and since the fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers are essentially just playing pretend, that’s all they need.

Homeschool field trip to Laura's Missouri house. Everything inside was so wee!

The Little House fandom among fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers is a little harder to unpack, but ultimately it, too, requires no close reading of the literature, but instead a vibes-heavy version of it, the same way that most contemporary fiction and films set in the Medieval period reflect very little actual historical fact or detail, but a whole lot of “Medieval” vibes. Also see: “Amish” romance. The Little House books read through a fundamentalist Christian homeschool lens are all about patriarchy, heteronormative gender roles, nationalism, and the outward manifestation of virtue evident in obedience and hardship. Pioneer-era skills are seen not as the complicated, labor-intensive work that they were but instead as proof of “simplicity,” “simple living,” “simple times,” and whatever other euphemisms they can think of to dog whistle anti-intellectualism. That’s why a homeschooling parent, as evidenced in McClure’s brief interview with one, generally has trouble vocalizing their intent in studying the Little House books, the point of them in their homeschool curriculum, or even the bare bones reasoning for why they make a good immersive unit study for children--it’s rarely more complicated than that they want to role-play Little Gender Roles on the Prairie with their kids.

a genuine hay twist to see us through the Long Winter!

Tangent to the book review, but speaking as the type of homeschooler who had the kids building backyard trebuchets and not the type of homeschooler who named them after Bible characters, the Little House books DO make an excellent, immersive unit study for any age of homeschooler, and an excellent lens through which to study US history and geography. It’s still prairie bonnets and butter churns, but with context and reference books! You do tend to do a lot of activities *with* the Christian survivalists, but you are not *of* them, you know?

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying McClure’s eventual conclusion/explanation that her obsession with Little House is her way of processing the trauma of her mother’s death. Like, her mom wasn’t even that into Little House? I understand that it’s more about how little Wendy felt back then when her mom was alive, but even that wasn’t about her mom; it was about how unashamed little Wendy was in her fandom, and how unabashedly she enacted the role of fan. Like, Wendy, daydreaming self-insert Mary Sue LHOTP fanfic is a deeeeep dive, Girl! If only you’d had LiveJournal back then, you’d have been on top of the world!

McClure didn't love her faux covered wagon camping experience, but I had a ball during mine!

Rather than watching her walk awkwardly and indecisively through the world of Little House, fighting herself every step of the way, I’d rather have seen McClure spend that time trying to process the cringe nature of fandom, and pushing through the discomfort of being objectively not cool in order to enjoy something. Hey, I’ve been there! I was pretty embarrassed at my first Star Trek convention, even though I was enjoying all the activities and everyone else was happy and welcoming and unaffected. I just couldn’t get myself to turn off my own self-judgment and lean into the fun. That’s the kind of thing that I saw with McClure’s descriptions of her visits to the various tourist sites, when she was spending just as much time watching and evaluating fellow fans as she was interesting herself in the site. Girl, just be a fan and enjoy yourself! Put on the prairie bonnet and make a corncob doll! Put your hay twist out on the front room bookshelf where it belongs!

my little homeschooler making a cornhusk doll way back in 2011

Link me to your Little House Time Travel AU fanfic on A03 and I’ll leave you Kudos!

P.S. View all my reviews, particularly Prairie Fires and Caroline.

P.P.S. Want a couple of examples of properly educational ways that the Little House books can be used in homeschooling? Here's a reading comprehension activity for young kids using Little House in the Big Woods. Making taffy lets you do some Farmer Boy LARPing while building the practical life skills of cooking and following instructions. Use a map like this as inspiration to help kids draw and label their own line maps of Laura's travels. My favorite way to homeschool books, though, is to read them together and talk about them a lot and dive deeper into what the kids find interesting, building lots of historical, geographical, and literary context along the way.

P.P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!