An adventure through the surprisingly grown-up world of the beloved children's series

Though the 1970s TV series starring Michael Landon cemented its status as a classic, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie was also undone by that family-friendly program. When she tried to revisit the cozy inner life she created as a child in conjunction with the books, author Wendy McClure realized Wilder’s world was a lot more textured and adult than the happily-ever-after TV show — and the truth behind the books is even odder still.

McClure is at her best when she’s reveling with contagious giddiness in the strange backstory of Wilder’s books, but her return to what she dubs “Laura World” isn’t done solely via research. McClure also tries out authentic Little House recipes — the kind that call for two pounds of lard — and visits as many Ingalls family homestead sites as she can find. Her physical recreation of frontier life can drag the book down into navel-gazing hipster nostalgia — her trips to long-gone homesteads are self-consciously elegiac as she searches for meaning in her life from young adult novels — but McClure is so genuinely funny in recreating fellow fans’ strange love for a pre-electric-age world that the occasional dips are forgivable.

A frothy biography of the Georgetown hostess that focuses on the boldfaced names she knew.

Nancy Mitford modeled a character on her, but it was as a comically priggish American. As revealed in Caroline de Margerie’s bonbon of a biography American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, however, Susan Mary Alsop was far from the typical American in post-World War II France. Married to an American diplomat, Susan Mary was enjoying an affair with the British ambassador – one that didn’t impede her friendship with his wife. Later, she would return to America and marry political columnist Joseph Alsop, despite knowing that he was gay.

De Margerie stresses her gifts as a hostess, intermingling different strata of first Parisian and then Georgetown society, and her book is similar. Susan Mary’s great skill was as an observer, not in making history, and de Margerie’s great skill is in combining the boldfaced names amongst which Susan Mary moved into an entertaining look at the second half of the 20th century. The result is frothy fun, light on interviews and quotes and heavy on the authorial voice. American Lady isn’t exactly scholarly, but for those interested in anecdotes about the Kennedy White House or newly liberated Paris, it’s a gossipy treat.