She’s smart, enterprising, and determined. Terpsichore is the eldest child, with twin younger sisters and an infant brother, and handles much of the housework to help her mother out. While it takes place during the Great Depression, this is new territory, and worth the read. The book takes a deeper look into a moment in history I haven’t yet seen captured in historical fiction.
(There are no interactions between the mostly white Palmer colonists and indigenous people in Sweet Home Alaska a point discussed in the author notes at the end of the book.) Terpsichore – pronounced Terp-sick-oh-ree, named for the muse of dancing – even refers to Wilder’s book, Farmer Boy, when growing her pumpkin to show at the Palmer Colony Fair. The parallels between Sweet Home Alaska and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series are wonderful, and a good readalike for readers who enjoy the Wilder books, and Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House books. I loved this book! Sweet Home Alaska is about the 1935 Matanuska Colony one of FDR’s New Deal projects that would create jobs, investment in the country and infrastructure, and colonize part of U.S.-owned Alaska, which wasn’t a state just yet. Can Terpsichore’s prize pumpkin win enough money at the Palmer Colony Fair so she can buy her mother a gift that will make her agree to stay? Life isn’t easy for that first group of colonists: there’s illness, and schedule and materials mismanagement leave a lot of folks living in tents when they should have had homes built, but slowly and surely, life in Alaska starts to grow on the Johnson family, except for Terpsichore’s mother. The family decides to give it a year, and they’re off. Roosevelt up on his New Deal offer: become an Alaskan pioneer in his Palmer Colony project! Terpsichore is at once unsure and excited: it’s a chance to be a pioneer, just like her hero, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but it’s so far from everyone and everything she knows.
Her father is determined to take care of his family, and suggests taking President Franklin D. When the local mill in their Wisconsin town closed, the family relied on whatever they could grow in order to eat, and Terpsichore can make darn near anything out of a pumpkin.
Terpsichore Johnson’s family is just one of many families suffering through the American Great Depression in 1934.
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