Reviews of Pioneer Girl: Growing Up on the Prairie

School Library Journal:

Grace McCance's family settled a homestead in Nebraska in 1885, when Grace was three. Her funny, exciting, poignant, and romantic life story, as presented by Warren, is based on McCance's own memoir, No Time on My Hands (Univ. of Nebraska Press., 1986), and other sources, including family interviews. Reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's tales of life on the prairie, Grace's story relates hardships and hilarity in a compelling mix. How is a body supposed to relieve the call of nature when privies have yet to be built and there's not so much as a bush or clump of tall grass in sight? The girl survives fire, blizzards, and an attack by an enraged heifer. These close calls as well as the daily trials of bedbugs, dust, and a scarcity of water illustrate the challenges of homesteading. Indians are mentioned only in passing. This is a fine personal portrait of one woman's life and a good read. Excellent quality archival photos, many of Grace's own family, enhance the well-documented text.

This charming true story is based on the memories, memoirs, and interviews with friends of the Nebraska pioneer Grace McCance Snyder. Born in 1882, Grace and her family moved from Missouri to Cozad, Nebraska, and set up a homestead in a soddy when she was three. While Warren tells the story as a narrative and illustrates the book with well-chosen archival and old family photographs, it is the adventures and can-do spirit of this family that compel the reader. From the inch-long worms that drop one day from the soddy's roof, to the family's camp near the Burlington Railroad construction site in order to earn money for the winter, through blizzards and drought, the family perseveres. Although the book presents some of the same pioneering spirit of the "Little House" books, and Grace McCance would be a contemporary of Rose Wilder Lane, the book stands strongly on its own as lively and immediate history. It could anchor a prairie/pioneer theme in the upper elementary or middle school curriculum. Related reading and index are included.

Warren, basing her work on the memoir of Grace McCance Snyder about her pioneer childhood in Nebraska, also tells the riveting story of life on the prairie and the determination of the families who settled there. Warren begins with the 1862 Homestead Act, which permitted people to earn 160 acres of land by building a house and cultivating the soil for five years. Despite the droughts, blizzards, grasshopper infestations, loneliness and hard, hard work, the families of the prairie never gave up their hopes. It's all rendered from the point of view of Grace (who lived to be 100 years old): "To Mama it must have seemed poor and desolate I know she must have been nearly crushed by the unexpected bigness of the prairie, the endless blue of the sky, our rough, homemade furniture, and the almost total lack of neighbors." The voice of Grace echoes the spirit of the pioneer families who settled the Midwest: "Most pioneer children did not know how hard their lives were. They just did what had to be done."