WAGON TO A STAR

Candids from family life in Iowa in 1878 designed for third and fourth grade reading, but taken from a conspicuously adult perspective. Only the vividness of the recreations of long ago pains and pleasures rescue this from stuffiness, and fit it into the category of ""when you were a child"". The Lynch children- Fanny, Ed, Mary and little Billy- like other farm children of their times, share not only in the family pleasures but in the crisis of wind and weather when preservation of property depended on ingenuity, not on machines. The idolized father seems a bit of a prig, but the children, timeless in their concern with secrets, surprises and imaginative games, make good company.