On the Banks of Plum Creek

I think I am getting into these now. Maybe it is because Laura is older and so has more detailed memories to draw on? Or maybe it is because they were somewhere with more other people to interact with? Or perhaps it is just that I am more numbed to prairie life than I was at the start, and instead of hitting ‘this is terrible’ I just hit ‘oh yes, another disaster that almost kills them all and leaves them destitute, but Laura has a nice fur muff.’

Pa continues to be infuriating. He is so full of love and charm and cleverness, singing and playing his fiddle, crafting things for the farm out of nothing. But really! ‘Yes, I will give you my entire farm for that wagon and two ponies’ ‘yay, great!’? It was foreshadowed very show more heavily by the author (‘yes, of course we can buy an entire new house on credit, living in a dugout is tedious, and we’ll be rich come the wheat harvest!’), but even without that it would hardly have been a great surprise that they are living somewhere where farming is Just A Bit Doomed. Ah, Pa.

They are nearer a town now, so we see Laura and Mary going to church and school. It was interesting to realise that even their contemporary Americans thought they were living a hard and miserable life - the town gets sent the equivalent of Christmas shoeboxes, by missionaries, for the ‘poor people’.

Laura is a bit less angelic with a bit more personality in this one. In fact, to my modern ears ‘this child is slightly greedy and snobbish, so it’s ok to trick her into getting covered in leeches’ is a bit awful!

I think this is the first time I’ve been keen to get to the next one. show less

The Ingalls family moves from Kansas to Minnesota, into a sod hut cut into the side of a hill. Pa builds a clean new house with the help of a bachelor neighbor, going into debt for the materials, but his first wheat crop is eaten out by grasshoppers, and he has to move away to work. Ma and the girls learn how to manage on their own, but the hardships are mitigated by the beauty of the homestead and their love for each other.
Whether all of this happened to Laura's family or not, she once more "stands in" for the experiences of many of the pioneers caught short by their ignorance of the cycles of nature in a new land.

I started reading the "Little House" books because of my daughter-in-law's love for them, and because she was reading them show more to my grand-children. I somehow skipped that phase in my own youth, as my reading was not exactly "age appropriate" after about the 2nd grade, going pretty directly from Dr. Seuss & Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to Robert Heinlein & Co.

I actually think I am enjoying them more now than I would have then, with some knowledge of history and raising a family, and a greater appreciation for Laura's writing style, which consists of non-nonsense narrative, sometimes blunt descriptions of harrowing events, a firm remembrance of what little girls are like, and a lyrical descriptive facility that conveys her love for the beauty of the landscape and animals that made her childhood joyful despite its tribulations.

NOTE: the obnoxious Olsen family is introduced here, and returns in "Little Town on the Prairie" (prominent in the TV series). show less

Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary, Carrie, and their bulldog Jack move to Minnesota this time, live in a sod house for a bit, then move into a new home built by Pa and a friendly neighbor. They live through a swarm of grasshoppers and several blizzards this time around, and Laura discovers leeches in a stagnant pond (*cringe*).

This is the book in the series that introduces us to the setting for the classic tv show, complete with Nellie Oleson and her bratty curls. I'm fascinated by how much more I can see in the story reading it as an adult. As a kid, I blindly loved the whole family (although Mary always struck me as too goody-goody), but now it's clear that Pa was probably always just a half step ahead of creditors and his poor life choices would show more be comical if they weren't so tragic. But Laura is still a girl I hugely identify with, just as I did as a kid, and I'm happy that Charlie is enjoying the series (although he's a much more sophisticated reader than I was and has few illusions about the wisdom of some of Pa's choices). show less

This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.

Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs.

Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much as a by your leave.

Another bit that stamps itself in memory is the prairie fire that brings the “wheels of fire”, or burning tumbleweeds, that also beset the Ingalls home.

“On the Banks of Plum Creek” recounts hardships like the fires in “Little House On the Prairie” and the blizzards in “The Long Winter”, but it’s funnier than those books. This is never more so than when Pa comes out of his den show more within shouting distance of the house; also when the girls bring in too much firewood; and when Laura, having attended church, stops feeling wickedness for Nellie Oleson and feels merely a “little bit of mean gladness”.

The book also has the child-eye perspective that is so prominent in “Little House On Big Woods”. But in that book Laura saw things that, though they were brand new to her, she could at least name, like a lake, or a town. In this book she’s constantly seeing things she has no name for, as when she first sees a belfry (“a tiny room with no walls and nothing in it”), or a rug carpet (the “whole floor was covered with some kind of heavy cloth that felt rough under Laura’s bare feet”).

And a blackboard, chalk and eraser: "On the wall behind Teacher’s desk there was a smooth space of boards painted black. Under it was a little trough. Some kind of short, white sticks lay in the trough, and a block of wood with a woolly bit of sheepskin pulled tightly around it and nailed down. Laura wondered what those things were."

All of this would have been ruined if the adult author, leaving the child’s perspective, had named these things before Laura could work them out herself.

The book is constantly playing like this with perspective. We are never told what something is until we’re shown what it looked like to Laura – whether it’s the leeches that she finds on her legs after taking a swim, or the burning, spinning tumbleweeds, or that visiting swarm of locusts: "The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm."

I read the last 170 pages of this book in one day, and I’m a slow reader.

One of the most enjoyable, and startling, reads I can remember.

This book has a few unique stamps on it, and I could have dubbed it The One With Walnut Grove; or The One With the Hobbit Hole; or The One Where Pa Hibernates Like a Bear.

But nothing beats those grasshoppers. show less

Pa Ingalls, you are a starry-eyed optimist. Always looking on the bright side. Grasshoppers destroy your wheat? No problem. Holes worn through your boots? No problem. Deadly blizzards nearly kill you? Still no problem.

How Caroline Ingalls kept from choking this man to death is beyond me. And she moved AGAIN when she didn't want to. Also, a baby pops up out of nowhere with barely a mention. However, this is one of my favorite books in the series because I fell in love with the idea of living in a dugout. In fact, I would go move into one right now. That's right, I'm a prairie gal. Sue me. I was sad when they moved into the real house. Plus, this book kills me because of everyone in this series, I love Jack the most.

To this day, I am show more terrified of a grasshopper plague and have thought through what I would do. Burn them. Burn them with fire. Thanks, Laura. 4 stars. show less

This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.

Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs.

Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much as a by your leave.

Another bit that stamps itself in memory is the prairie fire that brings the “wheels of fire”, or burning tumbleweeds, that also beset the Ingalls home.

“On the Banks of Plum Creek” recounts hardships like the fires in “Little House On the Prairie” and the blizzards in “The Long Winter”, but it’s funnier than those books. This is never more so than when Pa comes out of his den show more within shouting distance of the house; also when the girls bring in too much firewood; and when Laura, having attended church, stops feeling wickedness for Nellie Oleson and feels merely a “little bit of mean gladness”.

The book also has the child-eye perspective that is so prominent in “Little House On Big Woods”. But in that book Laura saw things that, though they were brand new to her, she could at least name, like a lake, or a town. In this book she’s constantly seeing things she has no name for, as when she first sees a belfry (“a tiny room with no walls and nothing in it”), or a rug carpet (the “whole floor was covered with some kind of heavy cloth that felt rough under Laura’s bare feet”).

And a blackboard, chalk and eraser: "On the wall behind Teacher’s desk there was a smooth space of boards painted black. Under it was a little trough. Some kind of short, white sticks lay in the trough, and a block of wood with a woolly bit of sheepskin pulled tightly around it and nailed down. Laura wondered what those things were."

All of this would have been ruined if the adult author, leaving the child’s perspective, had named these things before Laura could work them out herself.

The book is constantly playing like this with perspective. We are never told what something is until we’re shown what it looked like to Laura – whether it’s the leeches that she finds on her legs after taking a swim, or the burning, spinning tumbleweeds, or that visiting swarm of locusts: "The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm."

I read the last 170 pages of this book in one day, and I’m a slow reader.

One of the most enjoyable, and startling, reads I can remember.

This book has a few unique stamps on it, and I could have dubbed it The One With Walnut Grove; or The One With the Hobbit Hole; or The One Where Pa Hibernates Like a Bear.

But nothing beats those grasshoppers. show less

It's easy to get so stuck on the subject matter of the stories Wilder tells that we fail to notice her brilliant, deceptively quiet writing. Her descriptions of scenery are gorgeous, of course; but I love the tiny sentences that tell so much, like this one when eight-year-old Mary and seven-year-old Laura are confronted by a wild herd of cattle:

Mary was too scared to move. Laura was too scared to stand still.

Or similarly simple descriptions of the girls waiting for their mother to come home:

The house was empty and still, with Ma gone. Ma was so quiet and gentle that she never made any noise, but now the whole house was listening for her.

Wilder understood that the impersonal forces of nature are far more frightening than any imagined show more monsters, because nature doesn't care and so it can't be pleaded with or placated. When it destroys life, it's not being cruel or even indifferent. It simply is. As Laura learns when she thinks she can play safely in the creek after a strong rain:

The coldness soaked into her. This was not like wolves or cattle. The creek was not alive. It was only strong and terrible and never stopping. It would pull her down and whirl her away, rolling and tossing her like a willow branch. It would not care.

Later, safe at home, Laura reflects:

The creek would go down. It would be a gentle, pleasant place to play in again. But nobody could make it do that. Nobody could make it do anything. Laura knew now that there were things stronger than anybody. But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.

I hate it when people think that writing for children is limiting and limited. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote for the entire world, or at least those members of the world who enjoy being captured and held willing prisoner by a story. She just happened to remember that children are an integral part of that group. show less