There’s a log cabin in the back yard of the Madison Children’s Museum. Built by the Gotten family around 1840 in Wisconsin, the cabin now invites children to travel back in time.

There are aprons kids can wear, cloth vegetables they can cut with wooden spoons and pewter plates they can pretend to wash in a wooden sink and put away in a wooden cupboard. My son will spend hours in the cabin, making soup in the deep fireplace while I “wash” dishes, sweep with the twig broom or sit on the straw-stuffed mattress, glad for the relative warmth of a heater and (modernized) insulation and inevitably wonder, what would it be like to live this way? To dwell in this little house not just for an hour on a frigid Wisconsin afternoon but for a whole winter? Or for years?

A popular novel this summer, “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke, asks the same question, but with a digital-age twist: what is it like for a woman to wake up in an actual pioneer cabin after she’s become famous for promoting the lifestyle – homemade biscuits! chicken-fresh eggs! six farm-raised children! – on her Instagram account while a washing machine, a state of the art refrigerator and two nannies lurk just outside the frame of her carefully produced videos.

It’s a fascinating premise tuned perfectly to capture American readers for two reasons. First, what American girl hasn’t been captivated by the pioneer days and stories, thanks to American Girl dolls and books, The Little House books, Caddie Woodlawn, etc. And second, what American woman hasn’t been intrigued, irked or both by social media “tradwives” who get millions of followers reliving those myths?

Blockbuster concept, Caro Claire Burke. No wonder your novel was the book of the summer.

Only it doesn’t do anything to answer my question.

What was it like? Not this.   

I happened to read to my son the first chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” by Laura Ingalls Wilder the same week I started reading “Yesteryear.” Both reading experiences promise at first to fill us in on “What was it like?” But only one – the Little House book – delivers.

“Yesteryear” doesn’t even try. Instead of leading us into a reliable past, it pulls us into the echo chamber inside the head of the unreliable main character, Natalie. While there are hints she’s trying through her social media story to show what it was like to live as pioneer families lived, it’s clear she’s only doing it for show (the food processor lurks just out of the frame). And her trasport back in time to the 1850s – I don’t want to give it away, but it’s not genuine. While I found the book fascinating and read it twice, I find plenty of problems, but I’m not here to critique it. (Read a proper review here.)

I am here to think about the cabin.

Neither “Yesteryear” nor “Little House in the Big Woods” describes its central dwelling as a cabin, but that’s what comes to mind. The cabin is a container for some part of American history that doesn’t really exist anymore: small, isolated, self-sufficient. There were no houses, roads or people anywhere near Laura’s little house in the big woods; Natalie Heller-Mills has to drive an hour over mountain Idaho roads to get to Target.

Laura and her family made, grew or traded for everything they needed; Natalie goes to the grocery store to get the beef she needs to film a cooking tutorial.

There’s a gun over the door in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house, signifying that it’s safe in here because we can defend ourselves against the threats out there. There’s a dangerous weapon called the Internet out in the barn at Yesteryear Ranch. While the man of the house in Little House in the Big Woods goes out all day to fish, check his traps, and bring down game, the man of the house at Yesteryear Ranch tramps through online forums all day, growing more and more paranoid about existential threats and coming civil war.  

A different kind of weapon, a similar motivation? Trying to keep my family safe from what’s out there.

Both little houses have gone viral. Within “Yesteryear,” Natalie’s carefully crafted recreation of her imaging of American pioneer life earns her millions of followers. Laura and her family lived in genuine isolation, with nobody viewing, liking or checking in on them – a genuinely difficult concept for us cellphone clutchers to grasp. But 60 years after her family left their cabin in the big woods to relocate farther and farther west, Laura recreated her experiences through a series of books very widely read. Certainly more readers know the details of her Laura’s cabin in the woods and the life she lived in it than there are fictional followers of Yesteryear Ranch. Or real readers of the blockbuster novel.

They are both fascinating reads. “Yesteryear” pulls you through on the angry energy of the main character as you try like hell to figure out why she hates so many things so deeply. (I’ve read it twice and I still don’t know.) And the Little House books have an opposite pull to them – a gentle stroll through daily life when making butter took all day long, every week. (Perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder’s prodigious memory for her early years were developed in that environment of intense attention.)

The boxed set of Little House books 1-5 arrived at my house yesterday – I ordered them for my son. I let him find the package on the porch and cut it open. I expected him to find books (instead of, say, a truck set) and complain. Instead, he said “I love them.”

He’s been choosing to read “Little House in the Big Woods” over movie time at night. Maybe the surprise of finding a young girl much his age and much like him in a set of circumstances similar to his in some ways and in some ways wildly different is captivating him as much as it did me when I was a kid. And still does.

Tonight, we learned how to make lead bullets over a fire.