"Mama never prayed for anything she could get by her own efforts, or anything we could go without, and even now she didn't 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 didn't 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 a 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 Hammond's 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 woman's suffrage.

No one really suffers, especially the reader, since Victoria Case's colorful 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 McSweeney, the cigar-smoking storekeeper — but most of all here is Mamma Hammond, a woman who depended unfalteringly on God's word . . . and her own two hands. This glowing an precise portrait of an indomitable and loving woman is Miss Case's triumph — a complete pleasure for those who read it.

From the dust jacket