I basically sum this up as English people come to America, thinking they're moving into a ready-made town in Minnesota, but instead there's nothing there except blizzards and mud and locusts. It's like they played a Little House on the Prairie reality show and failed miserably.
The main character is somewhat likeable, but I quickly became frustrated with her and her stepmother's complete inability to make the father see that pretty much everything he was doing was wrong. They let the servant girl get away with doing nothing and eventually even paid to send her crying ass back to England. Stupid. The stepmother grows into a decent character, but the father's complete failure to do anything you actually need to be able to do to survive as a settler is mindblowing, considering he'd been in Minnesota once before and should have known he couldn't do this. It's like he expected everyone to do his work for him, just because he was the preacher they all followed there. But that never happened, because everyone got pissed at him for not telling the truth about...well, most everything. The bratty little sister isn't punished for ruining the main's paints and last paper, which she's been using as therapy.
And then the author decided to invent a best friend character for the main, who lost her little brother on the sea voyage over and her mother to suicide shortly after they arrive, then had to endure beatings from her drunken father. She ends up running away with a local Ojibwe man and actually got the only decent happy ending in the whole book, because they love each other. But who looks at their family history and thinks "Hey, needs more child abuse" and sticks that into this story for kids?
Definitely one of the skippable Dear Americas. You're not learning anything about prairie living here that you couldn't get from Laura Ingalls Wilder.
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