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Summary
Summary
The little house first stood in the country, but gradually the city moved closer and closer.
Author Notes
Virginia Lee Burton was born August 30, 1909 in Massachusetts. She was an author and illusrator of children's books.
Her titles include Maybelle the Cable Car, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Choo Choo: The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away. In 1942, she won the Caldecott Medal for her title, The Little House.
Burton died on October 15, 1968 in Massachusetts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The author of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and her works feature in a group of fall titles. Virginia Lee Burton's Caldecott Medal-winning The Little House, about a cozy country home that passes through the seasons, becomes engulfed by urban sprawl and is subsequently restored to a suitably rural setting, now appears in a 60th anniversary edition. A special bellyband bedecks the hardcover and a citation graces the paperback edition. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
This is the sixtieth-anniversary edition of the beloved classic and Caldecott Medal winner. From HORN BOOK Fall 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1986, Anne Tyler wrote an appreciation in this newspaper of one of her favorite childhood books, "The Little House," by Virginia Lee Burton. The book was a gift, she wrote, one she received in 1945 on her fourth birthday and has kept ever since. It tells the story of a house, built in the countryside but eventually engulfed by a burgeoning city, then moved, years later, to a new place in the country. Although the story is simple, Tyler wrote, "It seemed I'd been presented with a snapshot that showed me how the world worked: how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same." This preoccupation with time - how people weather both the cruelty and the comforts of passing years - has long been a part of Tyler's work. Like the house in that children's book, her best characters have a way of revealing themselves through their steadfastness, even (or especially) during wrenching changes. For Willa Drake, first encountered as an 11year-old doggedly keeping things together through her mother's various dramatic exits from the family, an early marriage offers a chance to build her own, more solid, home life. It also forces her to cut short her education as she raises two sons; after enduring unpredictability as a child, she has tried above all "to be a good mother," Tyler writes, "which to her meant a predictable mother." In doing so, we realize when we meet Willa at 61, married the second time round to a semiretired lawyer, that she has become sadly predictable, even to herself. A stranger's phone call pulls Willa into a brand-new life. It turns out that the former girlfriend of one of Willa's sons has been injured and hospitalized, leaving no one to care for her young daughter. Scanning some numbers by the woman's phone, the stranger mistakes Willa for a grandmother of sorts. Lacking much of anything better to do, Willa decides to go for it. A good portion of Tyler's 22nd novel, "Clock Dance," takes place in Baltimore, the author's adopted hometown and one she's made use of in many previous novels, including 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Breathing Lessons" and 2015's "A Spool of Blue Thread." Unlike in those books, whose characters mostly lived comfortably, here the setting itself is a little unsettled; Willa and her husband, Peter, arrive from their pristine Arizona retirement to a disheveled stretch of "small, dingy white houses with squat front porches, some of them posted with signs for insurance agencies or podiatry offices." The block, it soon becomes clear, is kind and quirky but a little off-kilter: a Baltimore neighborhood that could be the offspring of Mr. Rogers and John Waters. Here, in one of those little houses, live Denise (the former girlfriend), Cheryl (her daughter) and Airplane (yet another of Tyler's very real and lovable fictional dogs). Like Dickens, Tyler sketches a well-peopled larger community, bustling with friends, lovers and bit players. But the book's real action centers on Willa and how, in lending Denise and especially Cheryl some of her steadiness and predictability, she reclaims something of her younger self: a bolder, messier person than the superficial one she'd become, the "cheery and polite and genteel" woman who ended up living near a golf course and wearing expensive clothes. The title comes from a game Willa watches Cheryl and two friends playing: the girls' arms all arms of a human clock, ticktocking through a summer afternoon. In the world of children, and of a newly chosen family, Willa finds herself altered - or, perhaps, finds her unalterable self. Despite her many accolades, Tyler is sometimes dismissed for her books' readability, for their deeply familiar pleasures. And she can occasionally spout a cliché ("Sometimes Willa felt she'd spent half her life apologizing for some man's behavior"). However, it's usually the kind of line that's a cliché because it's true. When I told a friend I was reading Anne Tyler, she said, "Oh, my mother loves her books!" In the world of serious literature, this is not a raving endorsement. But, just like Virginia Lee Burton's "The Little House," the novels of Anne Tyler seem simple because she makes the very difficult look easier than it is. Her books are smarter and more interesting than they might appear on the surface; then again, so are our mothers. ?
