Laura Ingalls Is Ruining My Life

Shelley Tougas's Laura Ingalls Is Ruining My Life is a funny, sharp family story for 11 year olds about a girl whose mum moves them to a tiny prairie town so she can write a book.

What happens

Charlotte and her twin brother Freddy are twelve, and they've moved more times than they can count. Richmond. Charleston. Raleigh. Atlanta. Lexington. Their mum always has a new plan, and the plan always means a new town.

This time it's Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived as a girl. Mum has quit her job to write a children's novel. She's sure that being close to Laura will make it happen (she had a dream about it, which Charlotte is desperate nobody at school finds out about).

Freddy protests with a vow of silence and a roll of duct tape. Charlotte just wants to be invisible at yet another new school. Then there's Julia upstairs, who talks non-stop and flicks her hair. Charlotte can't stand her. Freddy, strangely, can't stop looking at her...

Charlotte's voice is the joy of this book. She's dry and funny and she has everybody sorted into groups within a day. Her rules for new schools are brilliant and a bit sad (never make eye contact, EVER). You laugh, and then you realise how lonely it's been.

It's a clever way into the Little House books too. Mum reads them aloud while Charlotte is off sick with flu, and Charlotte has plenty to say about Pa, who just can't stay in one place. Sound familiar?

Some of it is grown-up in a quiet way. The family left their last home before sunrise because Mum had stopped paying for the car. Charlotte also notices that Ma in the Little House books hates the Native people whose land the family has settled on, and she says so plainly. It's all handled thoughtfully, but it's there.

If you've got a reader who has had to be the new kid more than once, they'll recognise a lot of this. And if they've got a sibling who knows them better than anyone, even more.

What to read next

If the prairie chapters grab them, Caroline Starr Rose's May B is the real thing. May is sent away from her family to work in a sod house fifteen miles across the prairie, and it's told in short, sharp lines of verse.