Sarah, Plain and Tall

Summary

Sarah, Plain and Tall is a short chapter book narrated by Anna Witting, who lives on a prairie farm in the late nineteenth century with her father, Jacob, and her little brother, Caleb. Their mother died the day after Caleb was born, and since then Papa has stopped singing. Caleb keeps asking Anna to tell him what Mama was like and whether she sang. One evening Papa reveals that he has placed an advertisement in the newspapers for a wife, and a woman named Sarah Wheaton has answered from Maine. Each child writes to her, and Sarah writes back about her cat, Seal, her brother William, a fisherman, and her love of the sea. Her last letter says she will come by train, wear a yellow bonnet, and stay for a month to see whether they suit. Sarah arrives in spring with Seal and gifts from the shore: a moon snail shell for Caleb and a smooth sea stone for Anna. Through the following weeks she sings with the children, swims in the cow pond, slides down a haystack as if it were a sand dune, draws the fields, cuts Papa's hair, and asks to be taught to drive the wagon and plow. The neighbors Matthew and Maggie visit, and Maggie, who left Tennessee to come west, tells Sarah that there are always things to miss. Anna and Caleb fear that Sarah's homesickness for the sea will take her away. When a squall blows up, Sarah helps bring the animals into the barn, and the family waits out the storm together. Then Sarah drives the wagon into town alone, and the children spend an anxious day sure she has gone to the train. She returns with colored pencils, blue, gray and green, so that her drawing of the prairie can hold the colors of the sea. She tells them she will always miss her old home but would miss them more, and the book closes with plans for a wedding at summer's end. Harper & Row published it in 1985; it won the 1986 Newbery Medal and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

Top Lessons

• Love can be chosen

  Sarah is not the children's mother and owes them nothing, yet she chooses to come and finally chooses to stay. The book shows a family built by choice and patience rather than by blood alone.

• Missing a place you love

  Sarah misses the sea, and Maggie misses the hills of Tennessee. Neither pretends the longing goes away. Sarah's colored pencils show a way to carry what you miss into a new home instead of running back to the old one.

• Waiting with hope

  Anna tries not to hope too much, and Caleb hopes out loud. On the day Sarah drives to town, both of them must wait without knowing. The story shows how hard and how brave it is to hope after a loss.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book has no illness or medicine in it, but it is built on a family's grief: the children's mother died the day after Caleb's birth, a common enough end in nineteenth-century farm country far from doctors. Papa's silence and his having stopped singing, Anna's guarded memory and Caleb's repeated questions about a mother he never knew give a gentle picture of bereavement in a household, and the book is sometimes used with children who have lost a parent. Any clinical reading is the reader's own; the story itself speaks only of missing and remembering.

• Chapter 1

  Anna recalls her mother's death the morning after Caleb was born and the quiet that followed; Caleb asks whether Mama sang.

• Chapters 5-9

  Papa begins to sing again as Sarah settles in, a sign of the household slowly coming out of mourning.