Laddie

Title: Laddie

Author: Gene Stratton-Porter

Summary: Laddie is the tail of a border frontier family growing up in what is now the midwest. It it told primarily through the eyes of a little girl, the youngest of 12 children. She explores life in a carefree manner all the while learning invaluable lessons. Porter goes out of her way to be moralistic and often simplistic.

We are shown a world were learning always happens. Where truth is extolled as much through the consequences when lived as through the consequences of shirking the obligation to live true and honest. Porter illustrates a reality in which beauty and function are struck in balance and where the inhabitants glory in their balance and benefit on so many levels because of that balance. She paints a bright hero who is modest, handsome (to the point of dreamy) and yet not perfect and certainly not without trials. He ultimately wins all the best life has to offer: autonomy, marriage to an equal, proximity to kin and
fulfillment in a life he loves. And where all the characters find in Laddie their own potential and strive for it, often garnering a large degree of success in spite of hardship and/or poor choices made in the past.

Recommendation: Because it is told through the eyes of a child I never felt that the valuable lessons ever came across as preachy. Just the opposite. This story requires of it's reader introspection and analysis.

So many times I found myself stopping to consider that the ideas conveyed would be natural and obvious to a child. It is only through the jading of adulthood that ideas as simple as truth, kindness, friendship, and statesmanship are considered very complex and hence of limited application. In Laddie it is impossible not to think that the best of humanity is worth embracing and worth living up to.

Laddie is a perfect book to read and then read to your children.

Hearts: 5