Sweet Home Alaska Blog Tour

Sweet Home Alaska is based on Alaska’s real-life Palmer Colony and introduces a fascinating chapter in American history.  The Palmer Colony all started due to the Great Depression.  Families were struggling and for this particular family from Wisconsin, times were harder than ever.

The author Carloe Estby Dagg takes you back in time. Her writing makes you feel like you are there with this family experiencing life in the Matanuska colony.  During reading this book, you experience the struggles that they go through and simply fall in love with the characters.

About the book:
In Sweet Home Alaska it’s 1934 and the Great Depression is hitting the Johnson family hard in Wisconsin.  Terpsichore, “Trip”, is doing her best to provide for her family after her father loses his job at the mill. With her whole town turning to relief, President Roosevelt has provided them with an option—to become settlers of a New Deal Colony in Palmer, Alaska. Trip tries to make the best of her new living situation by channeling her idol, Laura Ingalls Wilder to embark on this grand adventure. Pro: No homework for kids who have to plant crops with their families. Con: No libraries or radios to entertain each other with after a hard day’s work. Pro: Making a new stake in virtually untouched land. Con: Scarlet fever epidemics. As they face the hardships of turning tents into barns, can Terpsichore and the other two hundred families find their place in the new colony? 

Both my eight-year old and I enjoyed this book.  We were both a little sad when we reached the end of the book.  I would love to read more about this family as they continue to thrive in Alaska.

Words from the author:
While reading Sweet Home Alaska, I had the opportunity to ask author, Carloe Estby Dagg to describer her 1-2 biggest inspirations as a writer.  Here’s what she had to say.

” Two of the most powerful inspirations to me as a writer are the books I read as a child and my Great-grandmother Helga and her daughter. Although I still read over 100 books a year, the books I remember most are the ones I read between the ages of 8 and 12 and the ones I read again (and again) to my own children.

My Great-grandmother Helga and Great-aunt Clara also influenced me – first, by providing the bones of a plot for my first book, The Year We Were Famous, about their 4,000-mile walk across the country in 1896, and second, by providing their example of determination to achieve a goal, no matter how many challenges they faced.

I didn’t think I could write, so rather than becoming a writer myself, I became a children’s librarian so I could work every day, surrounded by the books I loved. When I retired, I got brave. Maybe I couldn’t write a publishable book yet, but I could learn. I took half a dozen writing classes and attended a dozen workshops. I kept revising and re-submitting manuscripts and receiving rejection letters, If my great-grandmother and great-aunt could walk 4,000 miles and not give up, however, twenty-five rejections wouldn’t make me give up either. The Year We Were Famous was published in 2011 by the same publisher that had rejected it twice before in earlier (very bad) versions.

My next book, Sweet Home Alaska shows the influence of my childhood reading. I hope readers will catch at least some of the references to my favorite books, but if they don’t, at least I have the satisfaction of paying homage to those authors.

Here are a couple examples:

I wondered how I should I begin, and what came to mind was one of the most famous beginnings in children’s literature, from Charlotte’s Web: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”
I wasn’t going to start with the threat of bloodshed, so I gave my main character, Terpsichore Johnson, as smaller weapon, a hatchet, and a bloodless target, a pumpkin.

Sweet Home Alaska also pays homage to the whole Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Just as families were surviving on a handful of flour in The Long Winter, Terpsichore helps feed her family with chunks of pumpkin during hard times. Terpsichore also uses the milk diet she learned from Almanzo in Farmer Boy to grow a champion pumpkin, and even names her biggest pumpkins Laura and Almanzo.

Perseverance, from the example of my intrepid great-grandmother and the example of all the children’s book writers before me – how could I not be inspired?

Great-Grandmother Helga and Great-Aunt Clara
New York World, April 1896″