Ask a Bookseller: ‘Wilder Weather’ by Barbara Boustead

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Alena Bruzas of Francie & Finch Bookshop in Lincoln, Neb., has a recommendation sure to appeal to weather heads and fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series alike. It’s called “Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish.” Author Barbara Boustead is a meteorologist, climatologist and Wilder scholar. She brings her passions together for this nonfiction work, published by South Dakota Historical Society Press. Readers who love Wilder’s tales of growing up in the Big Woods — and on the shores of Plum Creek, etc. — know how dramatically the weather affected her daily life. Droughts, tornadoes, locust plagues and bitterly cold winters determined whether her family would have enough to eat throughout the year. Those stories offer exciting drama, but Boustead was able to verify that most of Wilder’s weather accounting was true. “She goes into great detail about her methodology, about the science behind gathering this data, how people have gathered data about weather since the 1800s.” Bookseller Bruzas, who says she is generally more drawn to historical fiction than meteorology, still found the book fascinating. “The way that she describes the Ingalls family dealing with this weather — some of it was unprecedented. It makes me realize that now we're dealing with a lot of unprecedented weather events, and it feels relevant, almost eerily relevant. She really brings it to the present."