Rural Route Bookstore - Children's Books

An online-only bookstore featuring books about
Rural and Small Town Life and the History, Heritage and Humor of Scandinavian-Americans

For Children
Immigration and Pioneer Stories

Song of Sampo Lake by William Durbin

Moving from Flinland to Northern Minnesota in 1900, the Ojala Family, discover that starting a new life in America was both a hardship and an opportunity. This story centers on fifteen-year-old Matti who, along with adjusting to a new life in a new land, strives to get out of his older brother's shadow and earn his father's respect.

At first Matti worked alongside his relatives in Minnesota's Soudan Mine, but an accident leads the family to reconsider and pursue the dream of owning a homestead. In the wilderness and on the edge of Sampo Lake, the property shows promise, but also means hard work and more new challenges. While he works hard at the homestead, Matti also teaches English and is a store clerk. Balancing brutal winters, rocky soil, language, and homesickness are pleasant cultural traditions, strangers' concerns, land and labor's rewards, and the joy and frustrations of a pet crow, a cat, and two mules.

Minnesota author William Durbin’s attention to historical detail makes him one of today’s masters of historical Young Adult fiction. See Winter War. Age level 8 and up; Grade level 4 and up.

CH - 15 Paperback $11.95

Britta's Journey: An Emigration Saga by Ann Marie Mershon

Britta's Journey relates a young girl's experience as she travels across two seas to a new life. This nonfiction work is based on Hanging on in Colvill, a family history written by former resident of Grand Marais, MN, Eleanor Stone, about her Swedish family's 1904 emigration from Finland to Ellis Island.

Being away from her father for five years has been hard for Britta, her mother, and siblings. Britta’s father had gone ahead to America to make money and send some back so the rest of the family could join him. On the family's journey to England, in England, on the voyage to Ellis Island, and subsequently during the adventure to the Midwest, not everything goes as planned. All sorts of tribulations and delays occur, and the family has good times and bad times, but Britta remains hopeful. Throughout the journey and the book, she discovers inner strength and resourcefulness she never knew she had.

Mershon, currently a writer in Grand Marais, has written this interesting nonfiction book in a way that brings history to life, and allows the reader to view the adventures of our forefathers through a child's point of view. Ages 10 to adult, especially middle school ages.

CH - 10 Paperback $14.00 Now $12.00

Elin's Amerika by Marguerite de Angeli

Unlike other Children's and Young Adult books about Immigration, this one is not about life on the prairies or in Chicago's ethnic ghettos of that era. This is 99-page book is the only one I have seen that shares a child's view of life in New Sweden, the first colony in the New World where the earliest, most adventurous Scandinavian settlers lived.

This experimental colony was founded in 1638 and located in the triangle area along the Delaware River which today is bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. Inhabitants were a mixture of Swedes, Finns, Lenape, Minquas (Susquehannock), Dutch and British people. Twelve expeditions of ships brought settlers and supplies from Sweden to this colony between 1638 and 1655, when it was taken over by the Dutch and nine years later by the British.

Originally published in 1941, American Swedish groups received foundation dollars and donations to reproduce this book in 2007 so that it could include research that has come to light since Newbery Away-winning author de Angeli wrote the first version.

This nicely illustrated book, in both colored paintings and black and white sketches, tells the story of Elin and her family and the adventures and adversity they experience. Appropriate for ages 8 to 12, the story focuses on Elin, who has been thrust into this foreign place and, like children all over the world in all eras, longs most for a playmate from back home.

CH - 34 Paperback $15.99

The Memory Quilt: A Tale of Friends & Family Lost & Found in the Great Cloquet Fire of 1918 by Pamela J. Erickson

History and fiction are combined in this exciting account of the catastrophic Cloquet Fire. Fourteen-year-old Lisa Hanson falls asleep in present day Cloquet and is mysteriously transported to Cloquet on the day of the fire. Everyone there thinks she is Liisa Maki, her grandma's oldest sister who disappeared that day and was never heard of again. By the end of her eye-opening journey into the past, Lisa solves the mystery of her missing great aunt.

FN - 02 Paperback $9.95 Now $7.95

A Bride for Anna's Papa by Isabel Marvin

A story about Finnish Immigrants on Minnesota's Iron Range in 1907. Thirteen-year-old Anna Kallio is forced to leave school to keep house for her father and younger brother after her mother dies. Anna and her brother conspire to find a wife for their father so Anna can return to school--even if it means a mail-order bride from Finland! This children's novel contains almost all of the crises common to immigrant life, and serves as a great introduction to the study of immigration and to Finnish-American customs. Ages 8-12.

FN - 19 Paperback $6.95