6 stars
First Sentence: It was January in northern New York State, sixty-seven years ago.
Thoughts: This was my first Little House book and it’s still my favorite. Traveling around the country in a covered wagon is cool and all, but being on an established farm where you don’t have to carve everything out of the raw land is a little more comfortable.
Also there’s lots of snow since the Wilders lived in upstate New York. Very upstate as in right next to Vermont and across the river from Quebec. We join the Wilders in January when the snow is the deepest and the lakes are frozen all the way across. I love winter. Summer heat wears me out (not to mention the humidity) and the cold is much more invigorating. I’m all about breaking icicles to melt for bath water and snowball fights and that sort of thing.
As with Laura in Big Woods, this is a year in the life of Almanzo Wilder. Specifically the year he was ten years old. He was already able to do a lot of work on the farm: harrowing fields, mucking out stables, planting potatoes, hoeing fields, shocking oat sheaves. He’s even breaking his own pair of ox calves to the yoke so they can pull his own little bobsled in the winter to bring in wood with his father. But what he really wants to do is train one of the Morgan horses his father raises. But his father says he’s still to young to be around the colts. “In five minutes you could teach them tricks it would take me months to train out of them,” he tells Almanzo several times.
Even though the Wilders live in a more settled part of the country than the Ingalls, they’re still very independent and self-reliant. They raise pretty much everything they need: food, wool for cloth, maple trees for sugar. They do get some things at the store; they have a reputation to uphold as successful farmers. But for the most part they make do with what they have on the farm. Which is quite a lot since Mr. Wilder is a savvy businessman when it comes to his produce. He knows when to sell his potatoes to get the best price, he knows how to get the highest price for his matched Morgan teams from the New York horse dealers, he’s even able to raise surplus wheat to sell for straw. Mrs. Wilder is just as savvy. She drives a hard bargain for her tinware and other household supplies. Almanzo watches his parents and learns so well from them that by the end of the book he’s able to bargain for a good price for the hay all by himself.
Be warned: this book will make you hungry. These farmers work hard all day and when they come to the table they’re ready to eat. You’ll gain ten pounds just reading the descriptions of the breakfast and supper tables. Not to mention Christmas dinner! There’s a Little House Cookbook and I really need to get my hands on it so I can see how they made fried apples ‘n onions and rye ‘n injun bread. And the stacked pancakes! Just thinking about those makes me crave pancakes. Excuse me, I need to add a few things to my grocery list.
The Eclectic Reviewer 