By Eve Bunting
A pioneer family reaches the Nebraska prairie full of hope. All except Mama, who is quietly homesick for the people and place she left behind, until her daughter finds a way to give her a small piece of home.
Zoe's family has crossed the country by covered wagon to homestead in the Nebraska Territory. Papa is lit up by all of it: the sky, the space, the land that will finally be theirs. But Mama has gone quiet. There's no one out here, nothing familiar, just grass to the edge of the world, and she misses the people and the place she left behind more than she can say. On the way to the nearest town, Zoe spots a clump of dandelions blooming gold by the trail. She digs them up and plants them on the roof of the family's new sod house, something bright and rooted that might take hold and stay. Whether the dandelions live becomes the question the whole book turns on.
This is the covered-wagon story with the shine taken off, which is exactly why it earns a place in the unit. Most pioneer books are told from Papa's side of the wagon seat, all hope and open horizon. This one sits with Mama and shows what the move cost the person who didn't choose it and had to leave everyone she loved behind. Homesickness shows up here as a real, heavy thing, and what Zoe does about it is small and human: she gives her mother something bright to look at, not a rescue. It also quietly opens a question the unit needs, because the land looked empty to these settlers and the book never asks whose it was.