Reading through this series with my kids. We're very invested now in the Ingalls family. I think the grasshoppers are going to be remembered for a long, long time in our memories. As are the fire balls which Laura describes. We did some further internet research to see what those might have been. Very interesting!

Delightful reading experience!

This isn't my favorite Laura book but it contains two of the most impressive, and perhaps famous, scenes: Nellie Olson dancing about with leeches on her legs (the absolute best example of "what goes around, comes around" I've ever seen) and the coming of the grasshoppers (nightmare material, that.)

This is also the book where the doll Charlotte goes and comes back--in two favorite, love-hate scenes--and the book where Laura gets a fur muff. Oh, how I wanted a muff. There are more simple, beautiful Christmases, of course.

The dugout on Plum Creek might have been the coolest Little House, of all, and this book might have the best ending, too.

Pa speaking:

"Look, Caroline," he said, "see how Laura's eyes are shining."

***

Following is my review of the series, in general:

The Little House books were almost as much a part of my childhood as my little sisters and my Siamese cat, and random snippets of text or an occasional illustration still pops into my mind at random moments. I’ll never hear about or witness a butchering day without remembering the drawing of Laura, playing with the pig’s bladder balloon. Most of my hazy knowledge of maple syrup making comes from Little House in the Big Woods. Leeches? I’m straight back with Nellie Olson On the Banks of Plum Creek.

Now that I’m older, I realize how effortlessly Laura Ingalls Wilder handed young readers a slice of history. We had no clue we were learning, we just devoured the story. I can’t thank Wilder enough for that.

The fact that many of Laura’s homes were familiar places only added to their charm. I was born (and mostly raised) in Kansas, which Laura traveled through in Little House on the Prairie. My mom spent her first six years in South Dakota, very near the site of the last five Little House books. When I was twelve we moved to Wisconsin, land of Little House in the Big Woods. It seems fitting, then, that as an adult I moved to Missouri, where Laura lived when she wrote the set.

My favorite book was probably always Little Town on the Prairie and my least favorite was definitely The Long Winter. I haven’t read the books for years—they���re on my to-read-soon list—and I’m curious to know what I’ll think of them as an adult.

On the Banks of Plum Creek has always been one of my favorite Little House books. This story makes me want to run barefoot through tall prairie grasses, roll down haystacks, and wade through muddy creeks. It makes the idea of only getting a package of candy for Christmas seem extra-special and a dinner of “beautiful brown baked beans [and] golden corn-bread” sounds more appealing than steak and crème brulee. I don’t know how she does it, but Laura Ingalls Wilder weaves some sort of prairie magic in these books.

The character who stood out most to me was Ma, who is so agreeable and unselfish. My husband dragged me out to the middle of nowhere – that’s OK! Our wheat crop just got eaten by a pestilential storm of locusts – we’ll get by! You want me to live in a hole in a bank? Sure, honey! A rabid cow just ran over the top of my sod house and nearly fell through and killed me and my daughter – hey, that’s OK “there’s no great damage done.” Wow. I wish I could weather the storms of life as well as Ma.

Man they almost die so many times. And Pa is such a frustrating character. He is loving but he continues to move them to terrible places to live.

October 2021 re-read, audiobook.
I never read these books as a child (why?) but I did, for some reason, read the first chapter out of this one (why didn't I finish it?) as a nine year old, and have been enamored with "the door in the ground" ever since. I read this series for the first time as a teen, and read them all several times over. It's been an interesting perspective re-reading as an adult. I sympathize with Ma and find myself worried for her, how she has to cope and keep up a brave front for the girls during a lot of the harder moments in this story. There are a LOT of hard times in this book. But the family perseveres, finds silver linings in every rain cloud, and finds their joy and security in being together. Good stuff.

August 2013 re-read, audiobook.
My favorite volume of Laura's youth...

We enjoyed listening to this over the past few weeks. Lots of good discussion points, especially when talking about Nellie Olson.

My third or fourth time reading this, and I still think it's one of the best in her series. The challenges they overcame were amazing, and most of all seeing Ma's brave cheerfulness in face of it all, but also the times when she quietly slowed down Pa, such as when she reminded him that the girls needed to be by a school (when he expressed a hankering for the West where the were fewer people and more game), or practically dressed him in extra socks right before he almost froze to death caught in a blizzard for three days! The grasshoppers were SO heartbreaking, especially after all the foreshadowing of hope built up in what they were going to do with that wheat crop.

This was the first book I read of the series because we lived in Plum Borough (by Pittsburgh, PA) and yes, there was a Plum Creek. My aunt gave it to my sister for her birthday way back when.

The bit where Ma makes Laura give the baby visiting her doll to take home and the other mother allows her kid to take it, considering how few and far between any toys are - that bit killed me. How fucking mean. Also, this family has horrible luck with farming. I mean, it feels a bit like maybe they aren’t very good at it either, but still. Grasshoppers the first year is rough.

So yes indeed, in Laura Ingalla Wilder’s fourth instalment of her Little House on the Prairie series, in her published in 1937 and 1938 Newbery Honour winning On the Shores of Plum Lake (where Laura and her older sister Mary appear to be around eight to ten years of age and the Ingalls family is trying to homestead near Walnut Grove, Minnesota) there are of course and naturally some encountered and in fact be expected time and place oriented and based instances of ethnic stereotyping (a number of by bien sûr and none other than Caroline Ingalls rude and snide remarks regarding Native Americans, and that even though Ma Ingalls does seem to appreciate her Norwegian American neighbours and how much they are willing to lend a helping hand, she still often appears to act as though English speaking Americans are supposed to somehow be a bit culturally and linguistically superior).

However, for the most part, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s presented text is simply, delightfully and enlighteningly a story of 19th century pioneer life on the Minnesota prairie, of its joys but also and in particular of its potential hardships, how in On the Shores of Plum Lake, Laura Ingalls and her family strive to become successful farmers but are constantly facing and needing to deal with rather major weather and insect related set-backs such as for example a devastating and all encompassing grasshopper infestation (and how due to this, the father, how Charles Ingalls actually has to and in fact leave his family alone on their homestead for many months to make enough money working elsewhere as a hired hand in order to make ends meet after the grasshoppers, after the swarming locusts have totally decimated the prairie landscape, including the family’s hoped for wheat crop).

A wonderful and very much realistic and authentic feeling slice of 19th century American pioneer life is On the Banks of Plum Creek (and in my humble opinion and unlike so many of the older Newbery Award and Newbery Honour books still both in current print and also still very much readable, relatable and approachable for today’s children), and indeed, a solidly glowing four star reading experience for me, with the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s narrative never once tries to make her childhood self appear as angelic and beyond reproach being really and truly very much personally appreciated (although I do still sometimes rather wonder if Wilder might be trying to make her older sister Mary appear at times as rather too much of a proverbial frustrating and annoying Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes in On the Banks of Plum Creek).

Decided to re-read this preparatory to visiting Walnut Grove!

When I was 7 or 8 this was my favorite of the series and all I remembered about it was the creek and the school and Laura's rivalry with Nellie Oleson. Which is quite remarkable because that is only a couple of chapters, and the rest of the book - the BULK of the book - is the battle against poverty, drought, and mainly, GRASSHOPPERS. The descriptions of the grasshopper swarms are absolutely CHILLING. I literally had goosebumps every time they turned up, for pages upon pages. No offense, Andrew Smith, but I found these three trillion (an actual estimate) grasshoppers, in a swarm 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, about three trillion times creepier and more horrific than the maneaters in Grasshopper Jungle, which made me go "ha" and "ew" a lot but didn't give me CHILLS. Truth is, actually, a LOT stranger than fiction.

As phenomenal as the story of the swarm is, what's even more chilling is that 25 years later the Rocky Mountain Locust was extinct. The last one was spotted in Canada in 1902. Scientists are still baffled as to what actually killed them. Probably it was us, changing the land. More here: http://www.historynet.com/1874-the-ye...

My gosh, what didn't I learn about real history from these books. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a staple of my library most of my childhood. back then you could cite me a line and I knew which book it came from, who said it and in what circumstance! I learned that as my father, born in 1899, was fond of pointing out to us, we had life easy! People worked really HARD for a living back then, and lucky to have three sets of clothing, and hope you liked mush, 'cause you ate it a lot! Dresses down to the floor in mud a foot deep in some seasons. Snow so deep Pa had to run a rope from the cabin door to the barn door, so not to get lost in the blizzards in winter, when he went to see to the animals! Every word of it borne out by Chicago weather, hot in summer, cold in winter, flies that bite, bees that sting. Hornets that chase you right into the water! The only music was home made, even the fancy dances. The best kind of music. And musical tunes and lyrics accurate to the time. Wasn't I amazed when "Women's Music" finally came along, and women were singing those songs, ditties women sang back then! it grew in me a lifetime love of history, people's history, not just names and dates and wars. Some day I will commence to use sentences and paragraphs again. I love these books! All of them from "Little house in the Big Woods" to "These Happy Golden Years." Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of my childhood heroines!