Book Descriptions
for Stairstep Farm by Anne Pellowski and Wendy Watson
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Episodic stories of rural Wisconsin living in the 1930s tell of cookie baking, ghostly games, dress up, thistle chopping, a tornado and holiday customs in a large, happy, Catholic, Polish-American family. The author grew up in Trempealeau County where this and other books in a generation-by-generation sequence are set. She gathered information for them from archival records in Wisconsin and even in Poland as well as from people living there at the time. The first book to be published Willow Wind Farm, is set in the 1960s. Two other books will be published next year and are set early in the 20th Century and late in the 19th Century. (7-11 years)
CCBC Choices 1981 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1981. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
Wisconsin
farm life in the Latsch Valley of the 1930’s comes alive through the
eyes of imaginative Anna Rose—a five-year-old girl who can’t wait to
catch up with her four older siblings. While Anna Rose impatiently
waits for the longed-for start of school, her days are filled with
family work—minding geese, picking nettles, chopping thistles, helping
with the haying, minding her three little sisters—and with family
celebrations—good food, singing, sledding, and games of Star Light,
Moonlight and Uncle Wiggily. Based on the author’s own experiences,
this story is the third of five books which vividly describe memorable
people and events of the Pellowski family and its Latsch Valley
descendants.
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.