I think we all are going to miss these books. I have been reading them to the whole family—we finished Little Town on the Prairie a few months ago—and we got to complete this eighth book in October as we sat in front of the massive fireplace of a television-free cabin in Northern Wisconsin…very near The Big Woods, in fact.
This book begins when Laura’s sixteen years old and it ends with her marriage to the gallant Mr. Wilder. Mary is gone by now and Laura realizes that she needs to help her parents earn money to help keep her sister in college. Though she’s not yet done with school herself, she earns a teaching certificate and picks up a job teaching school to the children living in claim shanties twelve miles south of De Smet, ND.
Laura dreads the thought of living so far away from her parents and sisters, especially in the home of the school administrator whose wife is a bitter young hag, and she’s got no clue how she’ll make it through the semester. Thankfully, some handsome guy in De Smet named Almanzo Wilder offers to drive his horses those twelve miles through snow and biting cold to pick her up every Friday and then to run her back again each Sunday afternoon. For the first several weeks and even months, Laura seems a bit aloof as to why he would want to do this, but eventually she starts coming around. Even when school is over and Laura’s living with her family again, the two find great joy in taking Sunday drives throughout the spring and summer as they break Almanzo’s horses, and their budding friendship centered on horses eventually blossoms into something far more.
Although Almanzo is a full decade older than Laura, both Ma and Pa approve of the him as a fine catch and they encourage the blossoming romance as far as propriety allowed. I must say that I enjoyed this real version of the love story far better than that of the TV series, what with all its drama. By the seventh season, everything in the show felt like a children’s soap opera, and no one in my family wanted to continue with it, which was fine by me. But these books? Yeah, we’re going to miss them.
This book contained a few quotable quotes that I enjoyed. I’ll close with four good ones.
“Success gets to be a habit, like anything else a fella keeps on doing…Have confidence in yourself and you can lick anything. You have confidence in yourself, that’s the only way to make other folks have confidence in you too.” (3)
“Maybe everything comes out all right if you keep trying. Anyway, you have to keep trying; nothing will come out right if you don’t.” (42)
“The end of one thing is only the beginning of another.” (237)
And finally, about the advent of the foot-powered sewing machine: “Our grandmothers would turn in their graves, but after all, these are modern times.” (265)
©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)