Little Blog on the Prairie, Cathleen Davitt Bell
Realistic fiction
First line: “At first, it felt like a normal family vacation.”
Booktalk: Most kids get to have fun during summer vacation. Maybe they go to camp, or visit their cousins, or – if they’re really lucky – they travel to Disney World or Hawaii or London.
If they’re really unlucky, they might be Genevieve Welsh, who will be spending her summer at Camp Frontier with her parents and her intolerable little brother. At Camp Frontier, you leave your cell phone, iPad, and Xbox behind – along with showers, refrigerators, and normal clothes – in order to live like an 1890s pioneer. Gen and her family will work on the farm, churn their own butter, and sew their own clothes. For the entire summer.
But Gen has a plan. She manages to sneak her cell phone out of jail, and she starts texting updates to her best friends. Her first text: “Help! I’m dressed up like an American Girl Doll minus the fashion sense.” Pretty soon, her friends turn her texts into a wildly popular blog, but by then, Gen has bigger things to worry about. Will cute farm boy Caleb notice her when she’s wearing a stupid petticoat? Will her family win the frontier camp competition? And most importantly: will she ever figure out how to cook anything edible?! You’ll have to read Little Blog on the Prairie to find out.
Similar titles: Nothing’s quite like it, but Running out of Time (Margaret Peterson Haddix) is a great suspense novel that takes place in a living history museum, and Our Only May Amelia (Jennifer Holm) features a feisty protagonist living on the American frontier.