New Releases by Pamela Smith Hill

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known Little House series, wrote stories from her childhood because they were “too good to be altogether lost.” And those stories seemed far from being lost during the remainder of her lifetime and through most of the twentieth century. They were translated into dozens of languages; generations of children read them at school; and dedicated readers made pilgrimages to the settings of the Little House books. With the release of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie series in 1974, Wilder was well on her way to becoming an international literary superstar. Simultaneously, however, the novels themselves began to slip from view, replaced by an onslaught of assumptions and questions about Wilder’s values and politics and even about the books’ authenticity. From the 1980s, a slow but steady critical crescendo began to erode Wilder’s literary reputation. In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. This realism in Wilder’s novels, once perceived as a fatal flaw, can lead to essential discussions not only about the past but about the present—and the underlying racism young people encounter when reading today. Hill’s fresh approach to Wilder’s books, including surprising revelations about Wilder’s novel The First Four Years, shows how this author forever changed the literary landscape of children’s and young adult literature in ways that remain vital and relevant today.

In Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life, Pamela Smith Hill delves into the complex and often fascinating relationships Wilder formed throughout her life that led to the writing of her classic Little House series. Using Wilder's stories, personal correspondence, an unpublished autobiography, and experiences in South Dakota, Hill has produced a historical-literary biography of the famous and much-loved author. Following the course of Wilder's life, and her real family's journey west, Hill provides a context, both familial and literary, for Wilder's writing career. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life is the first book in the South Dakota Biography Series, which highlights some of the state's most famous residents.

A fantasy that includes mystery, myth, magic and the Holy Grail.After an archaeological dig at Glastonbury Tor in England uncovers the Holy Grail, Felicity and her mother, a professor of Arthurian literature, find that their destinies are linked across time with the Grail and the legendary King Arthur.

Fifteen-year-old Margaret Reeves O'Neill isn't likely to forget the day the war came home to Springfield, Missouri. That was the day her father left to join the Confederacy, fighting for principles he no longer believed in, but for a state he loved. It was also the day she met Percival Wilder, a flirtatious Yankee officer who, instead of being her enemy, became an intimate friend. Now Federal troops have arrived in Springfield. Reeves watches neighbors turn against one another--some supporting Secessionists, others the Union--and she witnesses generosity and bravery side by side with greed and looting. The life she took for granted--her home, family, the very truths she's always held dear--is changing before her eyes....

Sixteen-year-old Tabitha, the daughter of a preacher who believes science is Satan's work, longs to study at a university and dig for dinosaur bones, but in South Dakota at the end of the nineteenth century such ambitions are discouraged.