SEARCHING FOR LAURA INGALLS

The summer following third grade, Meribah Knight and her noted author-photographer parents (Dinosaur Dig, 1990) made a pilgrimage to some of the sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota that she had read about in the ``Little House'' books. The trip is recorded here in excerpts from Meribah's diary, in her mother's evocative prose, and in her father's lucid color photos. The whole successfully communicates a child's view of this attempted journey into the past; but because the focus is as much on the contemporary girl as on the long-ago Laura, the book isn't particularly informative. Readers with more than a cursory interest in the subject will prefer William Anderson's Laura Ingalls Wilder Country (1990). (Nonfiction/Picture book. 7-10)