By Patricia MacLachlan
A widowed prairie father advertises for a wife, and the woman who answers from Maine comes for one month to decide whether she'll stay.
Anna and her little brother Caleb live with their father on the prairie. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and the house has been quiet ever since. Nobody sings anymore. So Papa places an advertisement for a wife, and a woman named Sarah writes back from far off in Maine. She agrees to come for a month, so they can all see whether they suit one another. Sarah is plain and tall and misses the sea terribly, and Anna and Caleb love her almost at once and spend the whole month afraid she'll go back home. It's barely sixty pages, told in Anna's plain, careful voice.
Nothing explodes in this book, and that's the whole point. The tension is simply whether Sarah will stay, and MacLachlan makes you ache over it in language plain enough for a newish independent reader. It's a good match for a child who feels things deeply but doesn't want to be scared, only moved. And the ending gives back exactly the reassurance that kind of child is hoping for, so the worry never grows heavier than they can carry.