The fifth book in this wonderful series by Laura Ingalls Wilder takes her family from The Banks of Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, MN to the vast grassy plains of South Dakota. Laura’s father, Charles, has taken a job with the railroad office, which promises to pay a whopping $50 per month, so he moves his family to the greener pastures out West with the hope of claiming a homestead By the Shores of Silver Lake near De Smet, SD.
I’ve been reading this series to my children (7, 9) each night , so we’ve been getting a better sense of Laura’s life chapter by chapter. That being our process, I must say that we were all shocked by the very first page and fourth paragraph of this book, where we learned that baby Carrie had grown up, that the Ingalls family now had a fourth daughter, Baby Grace, and that the oldest sister, Mary, had gone blind as a result of Scarlet Fever!
Now, I grew up with the TV show, so I recall seeing blind Mary from that series. But in my memory, her blindness came through a slow deterioration, and I figured we’d get into that situation slowly in these books. But to see Laura’s incredibly anti-climatic transition from Book 4 to Book 5, I must admit that I was a bit disappointed. It just goes to show how much TV can spoil a good book!
The book itself is a bit more grown up than the first, since Laura herself is now 13 years old or so. A number of the stories better suit children in that age group, so some chapters may have gone over my kids’ heads, like “Horse Thieves” (Chapter 9) or Laura’s description of how the railroads were made in “The Wonderful Afternoon” (Chapter 10).
Still, they enjoyed this book as much as the others in the series so far, and they look forward to our nightly readings and especially to the next installment in the series. I’m going to disappoint them a bit, though. We skipped Book 2 in the series, Farmer Boy, which is about the childhood of Laura’s eventual husband, Almanzo Wilder, but since we finally met the boy briefly in Chapter 28 of this book, I figured it would be a great time for us to pause Laura’s story and go back to Almanzo’s. So next on the docket for us is Farmer Boy, after which we’ll rejoin the Ingalls in Book 6, The Long Winter.
©2020 E.T.
Read More from The Little House Series:
- Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932)
- Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1933)
- Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935)
- On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1937)
- By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1939)
- The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1940)
- Little Town on the Prairie Laura Ingalls Wilder (1941)
- These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1943)
- On the Way Home by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1962)
- The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1971)
- Little Farm in the Ozarks by Robert La MacBride (1994)
- Little House on Rocky Ridge by Roger Lea MacBride (1993)
- Confessions of a Prairie B*tch by Alison Arngrim (2010)