10 books like Little House on the Prairie

As a schoolchild I was enthralled by descriptions of America’s race to the Moon to beat the Soviet Union. But until Margot Lee Shetterly’s groundbreaking book, few knew of the Black female mathematicians who made it possible.

Hidden Figures is a sweeping work of American history that covers three decades and honors hundreds of women who worked as “computers”—back when computers were people, not machines—for NASA and its predecessor, NACA.

At its heart are three women, Katharine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, who were skilled mathematicians and engineers. The book unflinchingly confronts America’s racism and sexism but remains a story of triumph and courage. It inspired me to think differently about the history I learned in grade school, and should be required reading for all Americans. 

Perhaps Jo March was the first girl many of us encountered in literature who grew up intent on the work of becoming a writer.

I loved her sisters, her mother, and their adventures in New England during their father’s absence in the Civil War, but my eyes were mostly on Jo. Not only was she smart, lively, bold, and adventurous, she just didn’t stop writing.

She wrote her way through loneliness and rejection. She persevered, and showed me what it would take.

This historical novel has been heralded as a fresh look at the era of the Little House books, and it does a wonderful job of looking at frontier life in Dakota Territory in 1880 from the perspective of Chinese-American Hanna. It’s also an examination of a daughter trying to navigate an often prickly relationship with her white father, made even more difficult after the death of Hanna’s Chinese-Korean mother. I love Hanna’s careful study of everyone around her—observances that are borne from a need to protect herself from racism, but which are also windows to empathy and understanding. Despite her father’s resistance to Hanna following her dream to become a dressmaker, Hanna prevails, using her knowledge of her father’s own nature to win him over.

It is impossible to separate Cather’s heroine Alexandra Bergson from the Nebraska prairie she farms.

Alexandra’s character mirrors the land she, as the eldest child, inherited from her father and which she devotes her life to working. When other families give up, sell off, and move on, she doggedly remains through harsh winters and, against all likelihood, prospers as an unmarried woman managing a vast expanse of land.

Like the land, she remains both knowable and unknowable, at once harsh and majestic.

Possessing an external manner that is reticent, internally hers is an indomitable spirit. She is among the most inimitable of women to have ever appeared in print.

Annie Proulx is a genius with character, and she’s obsessed with how hard humans work to uphold their myths of identity and achievement even when the odds are stacked against them. Close Range is the best of her three very good story collections about the West. It’s famous, and rightly so, for the trail-blazing tale of cowboy queerness "Brokeback Mountain". But each story is taut with observation and image. “The Mud Below,” “The Half-Skinned Steer”—there’s more than one American classic in this book. Some Westerners aren’t fans of Proulx, but I am. She doesn’t pull her punches about what it’s really like to ranch, rodeo, fantasize about retirement, or care for family in a place with no safety net, extreme weather, and no neighbors around the corner.

Mollie was 18 years old and a new bride in 1860 when she and her husband left eastern Nebraska for the gold diggings of Colorado.

The 7-week journey across the plains tested her strength and endurance, but Mollie battled the hardships and isolation of pioneer life with humor, intelligence, and honesty. She never intended her journal to be published, but it was, and I found it inspirational.

The hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing heroine of the American West continues to keep a python grip on the imagination. “I’m a howling coyote from Bitter Creek, the further up you go the worse it gets and I’m from the headwaters,” she used to rap. Calamity fascinates because she is a self-made myth and Linda Jucovy’s biography is an informed and insightful exploration of that myth.   

I fell for this book because of the main character’s voice, which is earthy, believable, and funny. “Hard times are a penny for plenty,” Abilene says after hopping off the train in dusty Manifest, Kansas in 1936. “They call it a Depression, but I’d say it’s a downright rut and the whole country’s in it.” Carrying her daddy’s compass and not much else, Abilene boards with a preacher with a “jigsaw life” and seeks to discover her missing daddy’s past. Following her quest, I learned about things like bootlegging, the flu epidemic of 1918, the Great Depression, xenophobia—and a bit about magic elixirs.  

Apparently I’m not the only kidlit author who loves both the American prairie and all things British. When her Pa is accused of thieving, young Louisa is taken in by his accusers, the appropriately named Smirch family. Sour, mean-spirited Mrs. Smirch looks forward to seeing Pa hang. Louisa solves the mystery of the stolen items when she meets a gruff but sensitive... well, I won’t say, but he’s one of the Wee Folk from the Auld Country, far from home on the Colorado plains. A cute and lively read with a satisfying conclusion.

This historical novel in verse brings the Kansas prairie alive in all its beauty and harshness. The story is tense with few light moments as young May B is stranded alone in a sod house as blizzards rage outside. She’s a realistic heroine, tempted to despair but ultimately finding hidden sources of strength. Oh, and she suffers from dyslexia. Sometimes I think novels in verse will be too artsy or literary, but they’re actually easy to read, right? Perfect for a struggling reader, perhaps one with dyslexia.