Spoiler-free summary: The continuing autobiographical adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book opens with the family arriving to their new home in Minnesota, and goes on to cover a couple years of time as Laura goes from age seven to age nine. This is book three or four of the series (depending on if you count Farmer Boy), so you don’t need my recommendation to decide if you should read this one or not.
Discussion: As I said in my introduction post, I randomized the list of the Honors to determine the order I’ll read them. With the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, though, that made things weird – there are five that won Honors, and they appeared in my list out of order.
That wouldn’t be the end of the world. For one thing, a surprising number of the Newbery winners, which I’ve read, are sequels, or even fourth or fifth entries in longer fantasy series in the case of Susan Cooper’s The Grey King and Lloyd Alexander’s The High King, respectively. What’s more is that the second books in both of those series won the Honor, so I’ll be reading them very out of order and in a way that would probably disappoint the authors.
On top of the order issue, it’s the last five Little House books that won Honors (not counting the one that was published from a draft after her death). I ended up buying a box set of the series, so I could have read the earlier entries to be caught up. But again, it’s not the only series like this, and I don’t really want to be adding a bunch of books to the list just to get the full experience of the winning sequels.
And in the specific case of the Wilder series, I think I’ve already read these. At the very least, I remember owning this set as a young kid and reading some of them. My mom also loved the Little House on the Prairie TV series, which I know is not faithful to the books, but I’ve probably seen most of the episodes of that in reruns at some point. My copy of this book had illustrations, and I couldn’t help but think that they got Pa wrong – he should look like Michael Landon.
With all of that in mind, I tweaked the list so that the five books are in the same spots the random sorter placed them, but I rearranged them to be in chronological order, and I didn’t bother with the earlier books before jumping into this one.
Turning to this book specifically — again, you don’t need my review to gauge whether you’ll like this. Unless you’re doing an Honor list read through like me, you’re not starting here, or at least, you shouldn’t. Also, this series has firmly established its place in the American children’s literature canon, so even if I told you it was terrible, you should still probably read Little House in the Big Woods to see for yourself what you think.
Anyway, it’s probably been 30 years or so since I read any of the Little House books, so I didn’t have a specific memory of what they were like or a sense of if I’d enjoyed them. I did read Little Women and Anne of Green Gables last year, though, and I was reminded of the structures of those a bit here. This book is more of a collection of unrelated anecdotes than a book with an actual plot; a lot of the chapters could be removed or reordered with no effect on the book as a whole. That isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but it does put more weight on those chapters being interesting stories on their own, and in a lot of cases, I was mostly just bored. This might be the loss of not having read the first two Laura books – having an attachment to her character would probably help carry things better, but again, it just wasn’t there for me through most of the book.
I get to read four more of these books, though, so maybe they’ll grow on me. (I hope so.)
Next on my list: Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. I know nothing about this one, we’ll see how it goes!
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