"From Little Houses to Little Women brings a refreshing new thoughtfulness to the familiar, comforting act of revisiting our favorite childhood books. McCabe’s insightful readings and wryly observed travelogue make this an essential book for any classic children’s literature fan."—Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
"From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood is a triple delight. Nancy McCabe takes her readers on nostalgic journeys back into those books that she and many of us read as children, as well as on literal journeys to the settings of those stories and the homes of their authors. At the same time, she presents her childhood responses to works by Wilder, Montgomery, Dickinson, Lovelace, and others, as well as her skillful assessment as an English professor. This layered approach to the literature is both provocative and satisfying. From Little Houses to Little Women is beautifully written, and McCabe is a frank, enlightening, down-to-earth, and immensely likeable traveling companion."—Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte
"As a practicing writer of fiction, I cannot over-emphasize the importance of childhood reading. How enlightening it has been to read Nancy McCabe's account here, to share and compare both our childhood experiences and adult ruminations! Nancy's account of her car tour with her daughter inspired me to make my own visit to Mansfield, MO, where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House books. Childhood reading did more than delight; it resonates in who we are today."—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife; Abundance, a Novel of Marie Antoinette; The Fountain of St. James Court, or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman
"McCabe's book is a thorough accounting of—not to mention a more-than-fair contemporary reassessment of—the books she took at face value as a child and which still exert an inordinate amount of influence over our culture at large. It's also a funny, heartwarming account of dragging her moody, occasionally car-sick tween daughter Sophie through the minor literary museums of the sweltering Midwest and seeing her girlhood heroes through her daughter's unflinching, critical Generation-Z eyes, for better or for worse."—The Louisville Review
