Prairie Lotus is Newberry award winning author Linda Sue Park's response to Little House on the Prairie. Park describes Prairie Lotus as “an attempt at a painful reconciliation” with a story she loved but also knew she would never have been allowed a place in because of the prejudice and views toward Native Americans (those that were not white) as "lesser".

While Little House on the Prairie emphasizes the survival of frontier life, Prairie Lotus exposes the overt prejudice and racially motivated microaggressions toward communities of color particularly Asian Americans through the perspective of its protagonist, Hanna.

This was a good one! I'm adding it to the Asian Diaspora VBB.

I'm sending this to Spatial as part of the Asian Diaspora VBB.
I enjoyed this and hope that you do too!

Book has arrived! Thank you for sending, etherea!

Received from Round 2 of the Asian Diaspora VBB.

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I must have forgotten to journal when I read it. I quite enjoyed it and recommend it!

Sending to Hyphen8 as one of the books chosen from the Asian Diaspora VBB! Enjoy!

USPS tracking # 9549 0102 9577 2225 3373 30
ETA 8/29/22

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Hardcover with dust jacket; received from Spatial as part of my Asian diaspora VBB (round 3). This one was on my wish list - thank you!

I'm impressed to see that Linda Sue Park has reached the stage where her books rate a hardcover with embossed foil lettering. :D

Also: I too loved the Little House books as a kid, but my immigrant roots go back further than those of Linda Sue Park and Bich Minh Nguyen - my great-grandparents were the immigrants.

Mom & I both read this (although she hasn't read the Wilder books, yet).

As a ten-year-old, I didn't think about it much, but as I got a little older I easily figured out that the Little House books tell only one side of the story of our country - those "wide open spaces" were actually already occupied! On the other hand, it's true that most books tell a story from one viewpoint only, and Wilder's is not surprising given when those books were originally published (starting in the 1930s). It's nice to see Linda Sue Park try to balance things out a bit, as unlikely as her Hanna is. I'd recommend this book to any young reader who enjoyed Wilder's work.

(I don't know that I would say Ma hated Indians - more that she was afraid of them.)

[For adult readers, Jenny Tinghui Zhang's Four Treasures of the Sky presents a somewhat more plausible fictional story of a young Asian woman in the Old West, complete with a sadly historically-inspired ending - which inspired Zhang's book. For the grim details, try Jean Pfaelzer's nonfiction Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans - which I didn't get through because it was too depressing. I borrowed both of those books from the library in digital format.]

I'm counting this as my South Dakota read for the 2022 version of NancyNova's states challenge.

Time for Hanna to move on to her next adventure.

Saturday, November 5, 2022: left downstairs during the Discovery Fair.

Released for the 2022 NJABBIC challenge (week 45: pictures in pictures) - if you look closely, Hanna's torso shows a younger Hanna with her parents (see my previous journal entry).

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