Letters to the Editor
MLA Forum, October 2003 Review
Father, Ford, $5 a Day: The Mullers from Missouri
I appreciate your explanation that the usual procedure is for a publisher/author
to be informed when a review appears in the Forum and that in this case
there was a rare slip-up. I also appreciate the opportunity to inform
your readers of a clear error in last October’s review, which
I recently discovered on an internet search for mentions of my book.
Although this book should be in every public and school library in
Michigan, with the decreasing library budgets, if I were a librarian,
I would not have bought a book whose review contained the words “ambiguous”
and “confusing.”
The review stated that the time period was ambiguous. However, the
back cover, the first page of Chapter One and the photograph facing
it all indicated the early 1920s. Therefore, the world war would have
been the first one—“the war to end all wars;” there
would not yet have been World War II and so, in the 1920s, one would
not have referred to World War I.
I suppose most of us skim anything called Acknowledgements, or at least
the long lists of names. This one had few names, one of which was Laura
Ingalls Wilder, and said I modeled this work after hers: “an accurate,
and only somewhat fictionalized, representation of the people, places
and times.” Just as hers were told through Laura’s eyes,
this one was through Herb’s. I so enjoyed learning “the
rest of the story” about Laura and her family that I put it in
an Epilogue, but the fact that it was in my voice apparently confused
our reviewer. I hadn’t meant to do so.
So now that the “ambiguities” and “confusion”
are cleared up, I trust each of you will give this book a well-deserved
second look.
Sincerely,
Sherry A. Wells
Lawells Publishing
www.lawells.net
lawells@tm.net
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