“This earthly life is a battle,” said Ma. “If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make your mind up to that, the better off you are, and the more thankful for your pleasures.” (89)

This is book number seven of nine, and I think they just keep getting better and better. After taking a moderate break from our nightly reading due to travels, we finally finished The Long Winter and dove right into its follow-up here, with the Ingalls family still on their claim by the shores of Silver Lake near De Smet, South Dakota.

While this book lacks the adventures and thrills of the sixth book, it’s an entertaining look at what a calm winter and growing town looked like on the prairie. We get to meet some new friends, we get reunited with horrible little Nellie Oelson, and we get further inklings about Almonzo Wilder and his beautiful horses. That guy just might have eyes for little Laura Ingalls.

In this story, Mary gets sent off to a college for the blind in Iowa, and Laura feels lost without her older sister and study buddy. I guess I get tinges of the off-screen relationship between the girls who played Laura and Mary and think maybe they’d have been happy to be rid of one another, but you just can’t glimpse that in the least from the true-to-life sisters. The bond they’d forged over their long years of hardship and moves to new claims and homesteads might be fictionalized in these books, but I truly believe they have autobiographical roots and the love was real.

It was nice to see a bit of Laura’s maturation in this book, though for propriety’s sake, the author never discusses anything of puberty or the like. Still, one gets the sense that at fourteen, Laura was like any teenage girl struggling with the changes and emotions. Hormones were kicking in, and who needs a Nellie Oelson around when you’re dealing with that? A friend of mine once said: “I wouldn’t wish a teenage daughter on my worst enemy,” and as the father of a soon-to-be-8-year-old daughter myself, I can understand the sentiment and am already preparing myself for the worst.

Seriously though, Laura’s experiences aren’t all that bad, and she has enough distractions while living in town during the winter that these things barely come up. Some of the distractions are things I wish my own neighborhood would do during this pandemic, like the Literaries. What begins simply as a town-wide spelling competition grows into weekly meetings with grander and more complex themes. Of course, there’s the antiquated and offensive dance show by Pa and the other homesteaders in which they paint themselves up in blackface as “darkies,” so readers maybe should prepare themselves for that. But again, as a snapshot of real-life America in late 1800s, we shouldn’t be surprised by the insensitivity and, I might add, we also shouldn’t censor it. It at least opens our families up to the discussion, right? But that’s a whole other discussion.

What I loved most from the book was Laura’s hard work for the school exhibition in which she had to memorize and recite America’s history from Columbus till…I forget exactly. What struck me is that she didn’t know who would be in the audience that night or that those people might have her future in their hands. She had been so worried about taking the teaching-certificate test sometime down the road, perhaps next year, and yet she kept at her studies for this exhibition, and her hard work paid off.

This was an excellent anecdote and illustration of how Laura’s hard work and preparation for something specific applied to something much larger that she had been dreading for so long. It’s applicable to us all, that if we’re faithful in the little things, we can take responsibility for much larger things (to paraphrase Jesus). This was a great teaching moment for us as a family, and this is why I get so excited to read these stories to my kids….and why they’re just as excited to hear them.

We’re looking forward to the eighth book, These Happy Golden Years, and the budding romance between Almonzo and Laura that the cover promises. I’m not sure if we’ll get deep into the other books in the series not written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but time will tell. I may try The Chronicles of Narnia or the Anne of Green Gables series first. We’ll have to see what sits best with the kids!

©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)