[Little Britches 04] • Mary Emma & Company

The protagonist, Mary Emma Moody, widowed mother of six, has taken her family east in 1912 to begin a new life. Her son, Ralph, then thirteen, recalls how the Moodys survive that first bleak winter in a Massachusetts town. Money and prospects are lacking, but not so faith and resourcefulness. "Mother" in *Little Britches* and *Man of the Family*, Mary Emma emerges fully as a character in this book, and Ralph, no longer called "Little Britches," comes into his own. The family’s run-ins with authority and with broken furnaces in winter are evocative of a full and warm family life. *Mary Emma & Company* continues the Moody saga that started in Colorado with *Little Britches* and runs through *Man of the Family* and *The Home Ranch*. All these titles have been reprinted as Bison Books, as has *The Fields of Home*, in which Ralph leaves the Massachusetts town for his grandfather's farm in Maine.