A Lantern In Her Hand Author:Bess Streeter Aldrich After marrying Will Deal and moving to Nebraska, Abbie endures the difficulties of frontier life and raises her children to pursue the ambitions that were once her own. — Review: — "Piercingly beautiful. . . . Aldrich's pioneer woman was based on her mother, and the integrity of her depiction of life in a sod house in the late nineteeth-century Ne... more »braska speaks to her readers. . . . In her own introduction Aldrich writes of wanting to tell her mother's story after her mother's death: `Other writers had depicted the Midwest's early days, but so often they had pictured their women as gaunt, browbeaten creatures, despairing women whom life seemed to defeat. That was not my mother. Not with her courage, her humor, her nature that would cause her to say at the end of her life: `We had the best time in the world.'"-Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres (Belles Lettres 20081124)« less