MEMOIR
Though it picks up steam slowly, Andersen's memoir about her girlhood in South Dakota has real charm; she creates a realistic and endearing portrait of life in the prairie town where her parents run a newspaper and she and her brother love to prowl the Firestone store (it doubles as a toy emporium) and thrill to The Wizard of Oz every year on TV. If s Dorothy's mantra ("There's no place like home"), in fact, that haunts the author, now 49, after she leaves for Princeton and parts beyond. Her meditations on the meaning of home—and on the spiritual power of the prairie—are smart, engaging and, best of all, unsentimental.
