Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957)

I enjoyed this so much more than the first two. Almanzo just felt like such a more lively and interesting character. I guess that's possibly due to the opportunities of being male and possibly due to the opportunities of being rich, but it does make for a more interesting book. He loves his cows, and the horses, he works hard, and prefers doing things to sitting around in Sunday Best, he makes a few mistakes with his temper and his need to show off (or just sheer childish foolishness like show more feeding the pig toffee), but generally things work out well for him, he tries his best and the world rewards him for it.

They are so much richer than the Ingalls! I was amused by how surprised I was by talk of rooms, and completely flabberghasted when I realised they had a staircase! They keep ice all year so they can have ice cream in the summer!

Almanzo loves food. He does hard physical labour a lot of the time, and lives on a farm with fresh produce and great cooks, and the sheer amount of the book that revels in good food is almost overwhelming! Apple pie, doughnuts, maple sugar pancake stacks, whole hams - the farm is prosperous and flourishing and no-one is hungry here.

The start of this book is weirdly shocking, there are a group of boys at Almanzo's school who revel in beating up the school teacher (and have killed at least one school teacher doing this in the past!) but the new teacher is a friend of the murdered teacher, and attacks them with a bullwhip when they try it on him. Seriously!

I was losing momentum with these, but this lovely tale of training cows, feeling a pumpkin on milk, cutting ice and working hard all seasons to get the farm through the year was charming. show less

Things I remembered with love from reading this as a child: eating cracklings, making a balloon from a pig’s bladder.

Things I did not remember or even notice: there are a lot of guns and spankings. I told my friend this could be retitled “Guns n Spankings”. I used this as a point of discussion with my children to cover how disobedience could lead to extreme consequences in a time and place without easy access to doctors and communication. We also compared it to an Old Testament style show more vs NT as we were reading the Old Testament concurrently. It was interesting to reread as an adult.

My kids enjoyed this very much and I did too. I personally chose to edit out some language I did not want my children to adopt. It definitely held up vs some other books I’ve reread as an adult.

TLDR if you practice gentle parenting you might want to preread. If you are pro 2A in theory but did not grow up with guns you might also be surprised.

If you grew up never playing with a pig’s bladder balloon, what can I say? Samesies. show less

I recently read a review of the whole series of Little House books on the occasion of their being released in a two-volume set by the Library of America. These books were great favorites of mine as a child, but unlike many other childhood favorites, they have remained hidden away in the attic, unrevisited in my adult years. Reviewer Katherine A. Powers's discussion of the books' descriptions of frontier life and of the darkness inherent in it made me long to read these old favorites again. show more So I trotted off and snagged a few of them in paperback, my attic dwarf being unwilling to stand on her head and paw through boxes to find my childhood copies (which I once mutilated somewhat cruelly (by folding and crinkling the pages) in an effort to make the books look "old"; attic dwarf, in a slightly different role, was none too pleased with my efforts).

I remember that Little House in the Big Woods was not my favorite of the books (I think that was On the Banks of Plum Creek, but I won't be fully sure until I get to it), but gosh do I remember it well. I anticipated every incident, every illustration, even some turns of phrase. I started leafing ahead to see "How far til the stump that looked like a bear?" or "When do we get to the naughty boy and the bees?" Again, unlike other childhood favorites I have read again when grown up, I have little or no recollection of reading these, which makes me think I read them (or they were read to me) when I was so young that they just sort of became part of my own personal idiomythology (that's not a word, surely; surely it should be?). In any case, they were a delight to read now, and not just for the nostalgia. The prose is very simple, but there's often something poetic about it, and despite the episodic nature of the story (there's no plot beyond detailing how people stayed alive and happy in the big woods of Wisconsin in the 1870s), the book was practically a page-turner for me. Incidents that were mostly just adventures for me when I was a child now are tinged with a darkness that did not occur to me then. When Pa is away and Ma and Laura find a hungry bear inside the barn fence, what if the bear had killed Ma? What happens to a seven-year-old, a five-year-old, and a two-year old in the woods, alone, in winter with no way of contacting anyone? The reality of the thing is more real to me now, I suppose is a good way of putting it, and it engenders a respect for the courage of the people who lived these sorts of lives that just knowing that such a life was hard never could. This was fascinating reading, and I'm already well into the next one--or, the third one, really (I'm skipping Farmer Boy for now)--where I expect I may run headlong into some attitudes about native peoples which is going to challenge my fuzzy delight in rediscovering these books, but we shall see. show less

“There were no more lessons. There was nothing in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and wind blowing. The storm was aways there, outside the walls, waiting sometimes, then pouncing, shaking the house, roaring, and snarling, and screaming in rage.”

These recollections of frontier life, its hardships and joys, the importance of friends and neighbors and community, and most of all family, are beloved for good reason, withstanding the test of time to become classics show more still read today. There isn’t much that hasn’t been said about them, both in deserved praise and affection — and, sadly, on the other end of the spectrum, ridiculousness when modern day values, mores, and conventions are applied with no historical perspective whatsoever.

I doubt I can add much of anything new to the praise, other than to say that The Long Winter is my personal favorite among these books from Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s wonderful, and were it complete fiction, it would still be considered a classic. The fact that it’s based on real events only adds resonance to it.

The Long Winter is almost claustrophobic, as the reader feels trapped in this endless winter of intermittent blizzards that will bring families, and an entire town, to the brink of starvation. Yet it is also like a soft heavy blanket in which to wrap ourselves up in and stave off the hardships of life. It is a winter so harsh that Laura’s family must move into town for safety, and weather blizzards so cold and frightening that winter can only be defeated — and then, only just — by pioneer spirit and sticking together.

The inventive ways they keep going, adapting to each new setback as the train with supplies has one disheartening delay after another until they seem doomed, is a true testament to courage and love. It becomes increasingly bleak, and finally tremendously exciting as Almonzo and Cap set out in the short window between blizzards to find grain on a farm which may be only a rumor; and a suicide mission borne of the kind of humanity missing completely today in a certain part of the world.

More than any of the other books in the series, which are all great, I think this one really captures that life so well that had Wilder not written any others, this would still be considered a classic. I can’t say enough good things about this book. From the sadness of Pa’s cracked and swollen fingers that will no longer play the fiddle to keep the family’s spirits up, to the truly thrilling, edge-of-your-seat quest by Almonzo and Cap to save everyone in town from starvation, it is about as perfect a read, heartwarming and uplifting, that you’ll ever come across. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings beautiful memoir, Cross Creek, of a later time, is more lyrical certainly, and lovelier in the use of language, but The Long Winter is just as impactful in its own manner, and a must-read. Wonderful. show less