Books featuring pioneer Wisconsin girls include Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical novel Little House in Big Woods (1932). Novels about Wilder's mother, Caroline Quiner, as a girl in Wisconsin include Maria D. Wilkes's Little House in Brookfield (1996), Little Town at the Crossroads (1997), Little Clearing in the Woods (1998), and On Top of Concord Hill (2000), and Celia Wilkins's Across the Rolling River (2001).

124 Edith Shay Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn (1935) and Magical Melons (1944) have a frontier Wisconsin protagonist. Brink's Winter Cottage (1968) portrays a Depression-era Wisconsin family that takes in runaways and strangers like the way Doreen and Aesylnn helped Katherine. Other books about teenage characters living in nineteenthcentury Wisconsin include Walter and Marion Havighurst's Song of the Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin (1949), and William F. Steuber's The Landlooker (1991).

Although Gloria Whelan's books are set in Michigan, they share themes and characteristics with LaFaye's novel. In The...