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!

Day #2 in Southern California: I Did Not Die in the Desert, But It Was Definitely a Possibility

If you wanted to die due to your own stupidity, the desert would actually be a great place to do it!

Also the mountains, if you're a stumbly type of person.

Fortunately the mountains weren't being particularly stumbly on this day, the day that we woke up early and drove up Palomar Mountain, leaving behind a misty, foggy morning at sea level and ending up in clear skies and views all the way to the misty, fog-covered Pacific Ocean. 

I felt super lucky that exactly one day of our trip overlapped with the summer dates of Palomar Observatory's guided tours, in my opinion an absolutely unmissable $5-per-person experience. But first, the visitor center!

Shout-out to strong female role model Margaret Burbidge!

You KNOW you want to know about all the potentially hazardous asteroids out there, as well as how close they're always coming to hitting us!

How many of these impact craters can you say you've visited? I've seen Berringer and Chicxulub!

I thought this display was super interesting--Palomar Observatory is still in heavy use, and this graphic shows the parts of the light spectrum that it can observe. All its projects, then, are stuff that fits within that specific spectrum--and there are so many projects!

A nice thing about showing up in time for the first tour of the day--and arriving pretty early for that, as well, ahem--is that we had the place nearly to ourselves, and there was nobody in the way of all my beautiful observatory views on the walk over to see it up close!

Selfie with Palomar!

I don't recall who was holding my proper camera for me while I was in selfie mode, but later I found this in my photo roll:

I am devastated to have to tell you that I did not see a SINGLE RATTLESNAKE ON MY ENTIRE TRIP! Later that day in the desert I was sure that every step I took would be the one that would bring me within rattling distance of a rattlesnake, but there was ne'er a rattle to be had, sigh...

And yes, I did take a new photo of Palomar Observatory at every step. It's just so pretty!

I don't know what I was really expecting for my $5 guided tour of Palomar Observatory, but it was honestly not getting to go INSIDE the observatory itself to get a close-up view of the telescope!

It's too big to actually see all in one frame, so my photos are just bits and pieces of the whole:

There's a giant mirror in there, a cage that an astronomer can sit in (but never does), and the machinery that moves the telescope.

Here you can kind of see the track that the dome rotates upon. There are physical marks all around the inside to align it properly:

We even got to go upstairs and walk on a catwalk circling the inside of the dome to see the telescope even closer:

Probably my most favorite photo of myself ever. I look so happy, lol!

During the tour, there were some guys who just KEPT asking questions about where one could conceivably go to see the telescope open up after dark. Such and such hiking trail, maybe? Or parking at this one particular campsite and walking onto the observatory grounds? Every time, the docent would be like, "There is NO way for the public to see the telescope in action. The observatory grounds close at dusk, there's no close vantage point from public land, etc., etc." Afterwards, walking back to the car, we were all, "Sooo... those old guys are going to try to sneak back into the observatory tonight, right?"

Although to be fair, omg I would LOVE to see the observatory doors open. That would have to be about 1000 times more magical than seeing them closed, and look how magical they look closed!

The beauty of having an activity that ends mid-morning is that you then still pretty much have the ENTIRE DAY to do more sightseeing! So even though the next place I wanted to go was another hour-plus away from the top of Palomar Mountain, we still arrived at the town nearest to it in time for an early lunch.

And then, it was off to see the giant sculptures of Galleta Meadows!

The sculptures are interspersed among the desert landscape north and south of the town of Borrego Springs, and when I was originally planning this part of the trip I thought we'd probably park the car somewhere central-ish--because I don't think we're meant to drive our rental car across the literal desert, ahem--and then just walk around between the sculptures that interested us.

And at first, that worked out great. Stepping out of the air-conditioned car into the 115-degree desert air felt like stepping into a clothes dryer--baking hot, with a baking hot wind blowing extra baking-hot air onto my face--and I LOVED it. It felt soooo warm and comfy, like sitting wrapped in a wool blanket in front of a hot fire on a cold night. All my muscles relaxed immediately, the tension that I constantly carry in my shoulders just immediately gone. I literally announced, "I LOVE it here. Omg I want to buy a house right here and live in the desert forever this feels so good."

So happy as a clam, I did walk between the first few sculptures, and then posed people to take their photos and took more close-up photos of the interesting way that metal rusts and the contrast of the sculptures and the landscape, etc. There were some great clouds. The sky was delightfully blue. The kid continued in her lifelong ambition to touch cacti and then regret it:

But I dunno, after a few minutes my body was still feeling great, all warm and cozy and happy, but my mind started to increasingly become filled with doom. I was plodding through the sand on the way to another giant sculpture in the distance, not tired at all and not sweaty and actually super comfortable, but inside my head I was like, "Huh. Am I about to die? I kind of think I'm about to die."

After a while, I was like, "Hey, does anyone else here feel like they are actually genuinely about to die?", and my partner was all, "Cool, cool, I'm gonna go bring the car around, okay?"

From then on, we drove between groups of sculptures...

Okay, based on the color of my skin in this photo, I probably was a little closer to dying than not dying. 

Surely this serpent is everyone's favorite sculpture. It was definitely mine!

Its spiny undulations actually continue across the road, and it's definitely the most interactive, with lots of serpenty bits to peek around and climb under:

Excepting the serpent, my favorite sculptures were in the slightly wilder, clearly less visited section south of town. Instead of bare ground, we drove down trails bordered by all kinds of cacti:

Because if you didn't get too close to a cactus or ten, were you even in the desert?!?

The best dinosaur sculptures are also in the south section:

I was trying to make it look like the dinosaur was about to eat me, but tbh I'm not sure what I actually got.

By late afternoon, we'd only seen about half of the 100+ sculptures, but we'd definitely put enough unsanctioned off-road miles on our rental car, so we headed back to civilization, taking a different route that led through some former gold mining towns turned tourist stops.

Another important trope: if you don't find yourself drinking a flight of local hard ciders, each one more unappealing than the last (come on--GRAPEFRUIT cider?!?), in a hipster cidery off the highway, are you even on vacation in California?

Tomorrow, we go to San Diego Zoo to see the pandas!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures

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I'd Rather Be Reading about Hadestown, But Oklahoma! is Okay, Too

Living the dream in 2024!

The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of the book is a misnomer, because it isn’t actually about any “secret life” of the Broadway musical, nor is it about how they’re built other than the thematic progression of songs throughout a typical musical.

However, since it’s almost entirely the songs that interest me, I was happy as a clam to read this!

I would have loved to have read a more recent publication of this book, because at the time that Viertel wrote this comparison/analysis of Broadway musical songs, the vast majority of my all-time favorite musicals hadn’t yet premiered. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 first performed on Broadway in 2016 (although it had been around since 2012).

Hadestown didn’t hit Broadway until 2019. I don’t love Dear Evan Hansen, which also premiered on Broadway in 2016, but I love some of its songs and I would have LOVED to read an analysis of them. It’s also too bad that the Broadway revival of Oklahoma! didn’t premiere until 2019, because it’s SO good. And how fun would it have been to be able to try out an analysis of overtly unserious Broadway productions like Beetlejuice and Spongebob!

But even modern musicals that were already around, like Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Rent, and Spring Awakening, got less discussion than I’d have preferred. Viertel spent a little more time on The Book of Mormon, but nothing compared to his continued reintroduction of Guys and Dolls and Gypsy into the conversation. Like, I get that everyone has their favorite musicals, but come on, Dude--it’s Guys and Dolls. It has, like, two good songs, and one of them isn’t even sung by one of the main characters. Calm down and talk about Fun Home for a minute!

I also would have been interested in reading a discussion of musicals that never made Broadway, or only had very brief runs. Ride the Cyclone only got as far as off-Broadway in 2016, and the Percy Jackson musical had an off-Broadway run in 2014 (and a brief, unsuccessful Broadway stint in 2019), but they’re now both very popular student productions, and I think it would be cool to discuss why. It’s the minimal staging requirements and focus on the young adult experience, obviously, but there’s more to unpack.

I do think the formula of a typical Broadway musical is as interesting as the author does, and I was interested in seeing how various examples of the genre shape up. The analysis is a little Lit Crit 101 at times--like, yeah, Hamilton DOES throw away his shot both literally and figuratively after telling everyone he won’t, just like Eliza feels way more “helpless” while he’s alive than she does after his death (I don’t think Viertel brings up that latter one; that’s just my bonus Lit Crit 101 analysis for you!)--but that’s not a bad thing, because it can be so hard to think critically about the media we consume that even more basic insights can feel novel and inspire us to dig deeper on our own. I did side-eye Viertel’s statement that Hamilton’s I Want rap is “not a conventional song,” though, because yes it is? Red flag, Dude.

I think I do pretty well on my own at analyzing my favorite musicals, but I don’t know much about their production, so although this book wasn’t as heavy on the production side as I thought it would be, there were still numerous interesting tidbits for me to pick up. Now that I know that Wicked, although it’s not a musical that I particularly like, was written by the creator of My So-Called Life, which I LOOOOOVED as a teenager, I actually am probably going to give it another watch, and be a lot more generous with my assessment that time, too, ahem.

My favorite part of the book was honestly just the constant references. I happened to be reading it while playing the role of passenger princess during a road trip, so it was easy to pull up all the songs and musicals referenced and force, I mean treat the rest of the car to them. I hadn’t thought about or listened to “Comedy Tonight” since I was a teenager, and yeah, actually it IS so good! 

I’d never seen or listened to “Gypsy” before, but it’s interesting enough that now I’m very curious to see the current revival with Audra McDonald (that’s another thing that would have been cool for Vietel to dive into analyzing--comparison/contrast of original musicals to their revivals!). 

And then, of course, while I’m already in the car and holding the aux cord I might as well make my family also listen to songs and musicals that weren’t mentioned in the book but should have been. Let’s listen to my favorite songs from Hair! 

The Spongebob song that David Bowie wrote! Josh Groban’s Sweeney Todd revival!

And then the youngest passenger brought up Next to Normal, which is having a Whole Thing right now, so we finished out the drive by finding a podcast that had obligingly captured the West End pro shot and listening to that in its entirety.

Thanks, Pirates!

P.S. View all my reviews

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I'm Going To Find the Lost Loot of KV 55 and Then Join King Tut's Death Cult

visiting a mummy in the Yale Peabody Museum, 2013

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book that I would love to see a large-format, sumptuously illustrated and thoroughly annotated edition of. To be fair, there ARE some illustrations and some annotations, some maps and some diagrams, but in order to fully appreciate the information and process it I would have needed a lot, lot, LOT more. And maybe I’m just a dummy and this book is meant for experts who already know where the Valley of the King is compared to where the Theban necropolis is and where the Great Pyramids are in relation to all that, but I don’t think it is. The cover is too cute to be solely for experts!

Even having to look a lot of stuff up and just wonder about other stuff when I was too lazy to look it up, though, I did get a lot from the book. I thought it was interesting that all the regular folks who buried their loved ones in shallow graves at the edge of the desert were the ones who got it right, because the temperature and the lack of humidity naturally mummify corpses buried in that manner. It’s only because the royalty wanted to put themselves somewhere special that they had to go through all that work to do manually what the elements would have otherwise done for them perfectly well. Like, even in the ancient times people were showing off their wealth by making other people work harder!

At first, I also wanted to feel sorry for the long-ago deceased royalty. Having all that stuff/symbolic stuff around their corpses was super important to them, right, because then that’s the nice stuff they’d have around them in their afterlife? So imagine that you’ve done your nice burial and you have all your nice, sumptuous things around you and you’re having an absolutely awesome afterlife, but then all of a sudden your shit just starts disappearing, because back on earthside some grave robbers have discovered your tomb!

Tutankhamun, who in this book is hilariously described as the Benjamin Harrison of pharaohs, probably thought he had it MADE in the afterlife. For thousands of years the bigger, better pharaohs were just walking around naked, all their nice stuff having been stolen or excavated already, while he had ALL his nice stuff. Every single piece! I bet all the other pharaohs laughed their asses off when one day his chariot just disappeared--poof!--out from under him, followed by all his servants, and his cool clothes, and everything else that made the afterlife worth living.

And then he never got any of it back, because his stuff is in a museum and he’s back on display in his tomb!

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Honestly, it all made me kind of wonder if the entire concept of archaeology, excavating these people’s tombs that they deliberately had hidden on purpose, then removing all their nice stuff and displaying it in museums all over the place when their religious practice was to keep it all with their bodies, is actually unethical. I mean, wouldn’t respect for the religious beliefs of these fellow humans require that you NOT unearth and fish out and display all their stuff? How far back in time do you have to go before it’s definitely okay to put a full-on person’s corpse in a museum?

It reminds me of one of my other favorite excavations, Spiro Mounds, and how one of my pet peeves is that we can’t get a good exhibit going of most of the properly acquired stuff (we can still see the looted stuff, of course--there are goods looted from Ancient Native American mounds in the British Museum!) because they’re Native American grave goods and so need permission from the people who make up their descendants, but we don’t know who the descendants of the Spiro Mounds people are so there’s nobody to give permission so we can’t display it. What’s the ethical difference between people whose goods we’re not allowed to display and people whose goods we are? Coolness factor? The fact that one indigenous group was a genocided minority, maybe, and therefore we should be a lot more careful with them now since we were so careless with them previously?

Speaking of unethical acquisition... here's a mummy I visited in the British Museum in 2023!

Ethical or not, I’m super fascinated by the stories of tombs of Egyptian royalty that we know should be around somewhere, but that still have not been found. And Naunton keeps ending chapters by talking about how such and such a place and such and such another place were thought to be likely spots for excavation, but then the archaeologist died or lost their funding or spent the rest of their career working on something else and those spots never did get excavated. Dude, just buy me a plane ticket and book me a guide who speaks the language and *I’LL* go excavating for these lost tombs!

My favorite extracurricular deep dive comes from Naunton’s chapter on “The Missing Amarna Royals.” In it, Naunton tells the story of the excavation of KV 55, including this VERY “intriguing note:”

“The coffin found in KV 55 was lined with several sheets of gold foil, which had become detached from the badly decayed wooden case, and were subsequently kept in storage separately in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. These subsequently disappeared, but resurfaced on the art market in the 1980s, and were then purchased by two German museums. Those sheets that were part of the original coffin base--by now perished--were restored to a plexiglass substitute, which was repatriated to Egypt in 2001, along with the fragments that had once been attached to the lid.”

First of all: what the HELL, Germany?!? I thought we’d all agreed that you needed to be on your best behavior until the end of time! How does your museums purchasing stolen antiquities accomplish that?

Anyway, I thought that was such a weird thing to have happened, and such a weirdly neutral way to have put it--like, what are you saying by *not* saying it, Naunton?--that obviously I had to dive deeper. And the deeper you dive, the more interesting and weirder KV 55 gets!

 As in, there were a LOT of shenanigans involving its excavation. A LOT of shenanigans, and a lot of those shenanigans were perpetrated by the archaeologist in charge, who should have known better. So I guess much of the mystery surrounding who KV 55 could be, because we still don’t know, is because the archaeologists did such a piss-poor job excavating that they lost and destroyed a lot of important evidence. And then someone(s) on the team stole a bunch of stuff and sold it and that ended up in all kinds of places, and then even stuff in the museum got stolen and sold and ended up in all kinds of places? If you’re looking for your next obsession, there are a LOT of KV 55 conspiracy theories to invest yourself in.

So that’s going to be my next conspiracy theory obsession, I guess. And when I get bored with that, I heard that King Tut might have had a death cult!

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