This is a collection of the three Sarah, Plain and Tall books that is no longer in print. But you can still buy the books individually.

The story starts on the wide prairies. It’s winter, and the children Anna and Caleb are remembering their mother, who died when Caleb was born. “She used to sing,” Anna tells Caleb while hustling about the kitchen, making dinner. And their father used to sing, too. But he doesn’t sing anymore. Caleb doesn’t remember ever hearing him sing.

But now their father says there’s a chance that he may want to sing again some time soon. He shares a letter from a woman in Maine who is answering his advertisement for a wife and a mother for his children. (It worked for a neighbor, so the family is hopeful.) Over the winter months, Caleb and Anna write Sarah letters asking about her life, her cat, and whether she likes to sing, and she writes back.

Eventually the day comes when Sarah arrives by train, leaving the home where grew up, and she had lived with her brother who is married now – the house and her brother have passed from her care and she is seeking a new home, a home of her own. From the moment they meet her, the children are hopeful, parsing her every word for signs and signals that she may stay, may marry their father, may become their new mother.

But Sarah is like no one they have ever met. She gathers wildflowers. She longs for the ocean, something the children have never seen. When she does sing, her songs – like “Sumer Is Icumin In” – are strange and different. The children and their father look for ways to create the things Sarah misses from the ocean on the prairie. When she misses sliding down a sand dune, they introduce her to sliding down a haystack. She teaches them to swim in the cow pond – but she tells them it’s different from the ocean and her thoughts seem far away.

She comes into conflict with their father: she wears overalls (women don’t wear overalls) and insists that she can climb up on the roof and help fix the shingles. She demands to learn how to ride and drive the wagon so she can go to town on her own (“Don’t teach her to drive,” Caleb whispers to Anna, fearful that this independence will cause her to flee back to Maine, which seems such a magical place). He learns to roll with the punches, accepts and comes to love that she has a mind of her own.

The children wonder, when she does finally go into town on her own, why she wants to go, and whether she will she ever come back or just back on a train and ride away toward Maine beyond the horizon…

These books are simple and gentle, the events in this book don’t affect anyone outside of this tiny quartet of lonely people, doing their best to survive from day to day. They don’t have to save the world for all of us – just learn how to love someone and make them want to stay, in a situation that is, at best, awkward. The facts of the books are not clear – it is never spelled out how old the children are or what year it is. (I would guess late 1800s.)

This is a great book to read with young children, as the fears of children are vivid in this book. “I am loud and pesky,” Caleb cries out to his sister when the afternoon stretches out without Sarah’s return. “You said so! …The house is too small… That’s what it is!” Such distress just because Sarah has gone off by herself for the afternoon. Their father is more philosophical but not reassuring: “I don’t know [what Sarah has gone to do]… Sarah is Sarah. She does things her way, you know.”