Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction
Reading Level/Interest Level: 3.4/Grades
3-6
Awards: Newbery Medal 1986, ALA
Notable Children’s Books 1995, Scott O’Dell
Award for Historical Fiction 1996, Golden Kite Award 1996
Series: Sarah Plain and Tall
-
Sarah, Plain and Tall
- Skylark
- Caleb’s Story
- More Perfect Than the Moon
- Grandfather’s Dance
Similar Titles: Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
In
the wild open spaces of the American frontier, a widowed father, named Jacob,
still grieving for his wife who died during the birth if his youngest child
years prior, places an ad for a wife. A response comes from Sarah, an
intelligent, strong witted woman from Maine, whose first love is the sea, but
whose brother is to be married, his new wife displacing her as head of the
house.
Sarah
decides to visit Jacob, Anna and Caleb for a month, to see how it will all work
out. They will know her, she says, because she will be wearing a yellow bonnet,
and is plain and a tall. Upon her arrival, Caleb and Anna fall instantly in
love with her easy manner, quick smiles, independence and kind nature. Their
father too, though quiet, grows to love and value her. Anxious are their hearts,
as the time would come for a wedding , if she stays, after Jacob teaches her to
drive the wagon at her insistence, so that she can drive into town on her own. Will
Sarah come back? Will Caleb and Anna finally have a mother to bring song back
into their lives and love into their heart? Or has the call of the sea
overwhelmed her enough to make her forget them. You’ll have to read this easy,
and fast paced book yourself, to find out!
HIGHLY recommended. The whole novel has a kind, practical and loving quality about it, easily conveying the emptiness of the Witting’s world if Sarah never returns and the importance of family, in all its forms.
Also a major motion picture starring Glenn Close and Christopher Walken (combining elements of more than one book in the series.....which of course I had to check out from the library again after reading this book ;) ).
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