Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park

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Reviewed by: Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park Elizabeth Bush Park, Linda Sue Prairie Lotus. Clarion, 2020 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-328-78150-5 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-358-33083-7 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 It’s 1880, and ever since her Chinese mother died two years ago, Hanna Edmunds and her white father have moved increasingly eastward from Los Angeles, hounded along by anti-Chinese bigotry. Papa believes they will finally take root in LaForge, Dakota Territory, an up-and-coming railroad town supervised by a fair-minded justice of the peace. They do successfully find lodging while Papa’s dry goods store is under construction, but Hanna’s longed-for tenure at the one-room schoolhouse is a mixed success: most other students are withdrawn from attendance when she arrives, and the teacher quietly brokers a compromise solution by helping fourteen-year-old Hanna graduate early. Hanna’s next challenge is to become the dressmaker her mother trained her to be, overcoming local prejudices, her father’s tight protection, and also some of his deeply private misgivings that she never suspected. Park writes in her author’s note that Hanna’s story is “an attempt at a painful reconciliation” between the Laura Ingalls Wilder books she loved as a child (LaForge is based on Wilder’s De Smet, South Dakota) and her awareness, even sensed as a child, of the systemic racism that rears up throughout the Little House series (much as Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House, BCCB 7/99, is a Native response to Wilder’s work). In this accessible exploration of a biracial teen’s prairie year, Park invites fellow Wilder fans to consider the struggle for respect and independence roiling beneath the iconic sunbonnet. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois