Kylee Crider wasn't always a reader. Her mom had been trying to get her into books for a while. It didn't take.

Then, in third grade, Ms. Sokan started reading the Little House books to the class. Something clicked.

"We read her books, and I really started to like them," Kylee said.

Laura Ingalls Wilder pulled her in — the prairie, the winters, the covered wagons, the world of a girl growing up in a place and time that felt both impossibly far away and strangely familiar. This year, when fourth graders at Tri-Valley Elementary were assigned a historical biography project — Google Slides, poster board, and a speech — Kylee chose Wilder without hesitation. She worked with partners Addie Martin and Eden Poppy and put together eight or nine slides.

She still remembers the details. "She was born in the big woods of Pepin, Wisconsin," Kylee said. She knows Wilder ended up at Rocky Ridge, just outside the Ozarks in Missouri. She corrected herself mid-sentence on the birth year — started to say 1880, then caught it: 1867.

The books did more than give Kylee a research subject. They gave her an idea.

During the conversation, she said something she'd apparently never told anyone before.

"I really never have told anybody this," she said, "but I started a book in my head."

She can't get it onto paper. She's tried several times. The story is long — long enough that she's lost track of her own beginning.

"The thing with that is, I can't remember what I started with because mine's really long," she said. "It's easier for me just to think it than to put it down on paper."

Every writer alive knows the feeling. Kylee is nine.

Her brother Joel, a sixth grader, is not really a reader. Kylee is. And she's becoming one fast — the Laura Ingalls Wilder book in her desk, she warned, "might be a little torn up." A book that's falling apart from use is a book that's doing its job.

Outside of reading and the story she's building in her head, Kylee plays softball — pitcher and outfield, placed out there because she's a strong runner with a good arm — and basketball, where she's more of a defensive presence than a scorer. Though there was that one game.

"One time I was the only scorer with two points," she said.

The entire team's offense, in one kid. She remembers it.

When asked how she'd describe where she lives to someone she met on a beach in Florida, Kylee answered instantly — and without realizing it, she did something unusual. She described central Illinois not from her own perspective but from the Floridian's.

"It gets really cold where I live," she said. "And we have bigger animals. Like cows."

Cold. Snow. Cows. She chose the details that would land for someone who doesn't have any of those things. I point out what she'd done — that she'd instinctively framed her world through someone else's eyes. She hadn't noticed.

That afternoon, Kylee also sat in on a presentation by Brett Miller, the Tri-Valley alum who built BRIK and wrote Patrick and the Magic Spyglass. She connected dots in real time: Miller mentioned the Lego-compatible products, and Kylee recognized them from Ms. Sokan's classroom the year before — newspaper clippings and bricks on display. She hadn't known the connection until that moment.

"I'm like, I remember seeing that in her room and all those bricks," she said.

Kylee has been at Tri-Valley since half a year of pre-K. Her teacher this year, Mrs. Gutierrez, went through chemotherapy and missed time from school. When she came back, the class was ready.

"We had a whole bunch of cards for her," Kylee said.

At home, Kylee's family raises Black Angus cattle. When asked what she wants to do when she grows up, there was no hesitation.

"I want to be like my dad and be a cattle farmer," she said.

Her favorite meat is ribs. With extra barbecue sauce. Not short ribs — too fatty. Her family agrees.

A cattle farmer who's writing a novel in her head that she can't find the beginning of, who describes her world through other people's eyes without knowing she's doing it, and who once scored her basketball team's only two points in a game. That's Kylee Crider. She's in fourth grade. Give her time.