Sarah, Plain and Tall

On the American prairie sometime in the late nineteenth century, widowed farmer Jacob Witting is struggling to raise his two children, Anna and Caleb, alone since his wife died giving birth to Caleb. He places a newspaper advertisement for a wife, and Sarah Wheaton, a plain spoken woman from the coast of Maine, answers it and agrees to come for a one month trial. Caleb, who never knew his mother, hopes from the start that Sarah will stay for good. Anna, old enough to remember what they lost, holds back, watching Sarah for signs that she might leave the way anyone new and uncertain might.

Sarah works hard at farm life she was never raised for, and she is honest with the children about what she misses, the color and sound of the sea, in a way that makes her homesickness feel like a real threat to the arrangement rather than a passing complaint. When Sarah takes the wagon into town alone one day, both children spend the whole time afraid she has left them for good, and her return, choosing them and the plains over the ocean she still loves, settles the question the whole short novel has been quietly asking. The book ends with Sarah choosing to stay and marry Jacob, a new family formed out of loss on both sides rather than out of easy sentiment.

MacLachlan writes in spare, carefully weighed sentences, barely sixty pages for the whole novel, and that restraint is the book's real skill: nothing is overexplained, and a reader feels every unstated feeling anyway. It is a quick read that still asks patience of a young audience used to more incident, and the plainness of the prose is very much the point rather than a limitation.