In her long career Virginia Sorensen distinguished herself as a writer of both adult and children's fiction. She felt that her children's novels were more successful: she won the 1955 Children's Book Award from the Child Study Association of America for Plain Girl (1955) and the 1957 John Newbery Medal for Miracles on Maple Hill (1956). Sorensen's renown as a children's writer, however, should not obscure her contribution to the literature of the western United States. By the time her first children's book, Curious Missie (1953), appeared, she had published five critically acclaimed novels, each illuminating different aspects of Western experience. She went on to write three more books about Western life: a novel, a children's book, and a short-story collection. Much of Sorensen's work is about Mormons and has helped teach a national reading audience about Mormon history, people, and doctrines. In a Wilson Library Bulletin from 1950 Nina Brown Baker observed, “A...