Published by Doubleday & Co., 1960, Hardback in Dust Wrapper. 1st Ed.
Condition: Good in Poor Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with grazes to both panels and short tears to the spine ends. Gently bruised at the head, tail and corners of the binding. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Previous owners’ inscription to the first blank. Text complete, clean and tight.
From the cover: Mamma never prayed for anything she could get by her own efforts, or anything we could go without, and even now she didnt pray for bacon or money or fresh meat, or even milk to put on our mush, but she prayed for sugar. It is the sugar the children remember to this day, and if the angels up in Heaven didnt know what sugar was in the beginning, they must have been very curious about it before Mamma got through.
In fourteen delightful chapters filled with wholesome humor and genuine nostalgia, Victoria Case tells the story of big-family life on a twenty-acre farm near Victoria, British Columbia, at the turn of the century and of Mamma Hammond, who proved forever the substantial theory that APPLESAUCE NEEDS SUGAR
Mamma Hammonds oldest child was Papa Hammond, and she had a natural faith in the goodness of the world, and enough inborn optimism to drive him to a frenzy. She also had nine other children to care for, and with very few material resources.
But with Mamma in firm, if subtly submissive, command, the family fortunes soon rose from the point when there was no sugar for the applesauce to a point where the Hammonds were model landowners and Mamma had time to campaign for womans suffrage. No one really suffers, especially the reader, since Victoria Cases colourful and rich portrait of warm family relationships is a story sparkling with laughter, realism, and tenderness. Here are memorable characters such as Albert Edward George Smorfitt, the stuttering, overstuffed schoolmaster; and Mc-Sweeney, the cigar-smoking storekeeper
but most of all here is Mamma Hammond, a woman who depended unfalteringly on Gods word and her own two hands. This glowing and precise portrait of an indomitable and loving woman is Miss Cases triumph a complete pleasure for those who read it.
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