(author's note, bibliography of Chinese folk tales)

Detailed, jewel-toned illustrations and spot art reminiscent of Chinese painting highlight key scenes and themes and serve as the focus of an overall exquisite design.Ī worthy companion to Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2009). Lin artfully wraps her hero’s story in alternating layers of Chinese folklore, providing rich cultural context. Realizing there’s a connection between Madame Chang’s stories and the missing moon, Rendi assumes the hero’s mantle, transforming himself from a selfish, self-focused boy into a thoughtful young man who learns the meaning of home, harmony and forgiveness. She challenges him to contribute his own stories, in which he gradually reveals his identity as son of a wealthy magistrate. When mysterious Madame Chang arrives at the inn, her storytelling transports Rendi. He wonders about the innkeeper’s son who’s disappeared and about peculiar old Mr. The innkeeper’s bossy daughter irritates Rendi. Bad-tempered and insolent, Rendi hates Clear Sky, but he has no way of leaving the sad village where every night the sky moans and the moon has vanished. Family friends include the Edwards family, the Garvey family and the Carters, who, in the final season, move into the Ingalls' little house.When a troubled runaway arrives in an isolated Chinese village where the moon has disappeared, he initiates a quest to find the missing orb and resolve his past.Įscaping from home in a merchant’s cart, Rendi’s abandoned in the Village of Clear Sky, where the innkeeper hires him as chore boy. Hanson (of the Hanson lumber mill), and the well-to-do Olesons, owners of the local mercantile, and also the primary rivals of the Ingalls family (except the Oleson patriarch).

Several other fictitious (some factual) characters make up the friendly community of Walnut Grove, including teacher Miss Beadle (succeeded by two other teachers, then Laura, then Etta Plum), Dr.

While the series is based upon the Little House books (and thus the real life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder), it is a very loose adaptation, with mostly only key events and elements of fact surviving the transition from book to TV series, the most important being Mary's eventual blindness, and Laura's future. Often narrated by Laura, the series follows her simple farm upbringing from her childhood until her adulthood with Almanzo Wilder with whom she starts a family of her own. A long-running drama based upon the 'Little House' series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, 'Little House on the Prairie' follows the lives of the simple, farming Ingalls family: Charles, Caroline, Mary, Laura, Carrie and then Grace and the later adopted Albert, James and Cassandra, who settle into a quaint little house on the banks of Plum Creek near the small town of Walnut Grove during the late 1800s.

Little house on the banks of plum creek