As Though You Didn't Already Have Enough Books to Read...

Please tell me you've read Ralph Moody's, Little Britches series.

You know how you can read some books over and over and it always feels like the first time? Well, the Little Britches series is like that for me. In fact, I believe I've read two of the books, Man of the Family and Mary Emma & Company, anywhere from 20 to 30 times the past 18 years, or so.

No, really!

These books are true recollections of Moody's childhood, first as a boy in the land of cowboys and ranches of Colorado circa 1908 and then later around the big city of Boston. The books after Mary Emma And Company find Ralph on all sorts of other adventures in different states as a teenager and a young man on his own.

Yet it's the early books I love best because of Ralph's amazing mother who had to finish rearing six children alone and the ways those children loved helping her, from earning money for survival to doing their chores without complaining. Sometimes Ralph and his siblings appear almost like kids from a different planet (do they even make kids like that anymore?), but this was a whole other era--and that's why Moody wrote the series--he didn't want his days and times to be forever lost. His books yank me back one-hundred years and I find myself living in Ralph's difficult world perhaps even a tad more than in my own. And at the end of each book I never want to leave the Moody family.

The good news? I discovered today that you can read Man of the Family and Mary Emma & Company both online! Perhaps you can read the other six books online as well (I don't know), but I didn't want to overwhelm you:

Man of the Family
Mary Emma & Company

(The website said you had to sign-up to read the chapters, but I was able to see them fine without doing so.)

If you prefer to actually hold nice old books in your hot little hands, you can find copies of Moody's books on Ebay, at www.amazon.com and www.bookfinder.com. Lately many have been reprinted so are affordable.

I'll warn you--these books are addictive. Tom read the entire series while he recuperated from neck surgery four years ago. He simply could not put them down and trust me that, truly, is saying something.


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To read an article about Ralph Moody, go here.

Ralph Moody's Little Britches Series:

Little Britches
Man of the Family
The Home Ranch
Mary Emma And Company
The Fields of Home
Shaking the Nickle Bush
The Dry Divide
Horse of a Different Color


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