On The Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Another absolutely delightful book, I am completely enjoying rereading the series.

This has got to be the best book in the series! I loved the stories and remembered many of them from when I was a girl. I especially love that it takes place in Minnesota!

Book #4 was pretty dull for an adult reader. It lacks the magical awe and wonder of earlier books (admittedly appropriate for Laura's developmental stage) and also forgoes detailed descriptions of day-to-day homesteader tasks that would have helped readers imagine a world so very unlike their own. Instead, the book hones in on Laura's budding personality: a feisty, mischievous tomboy who is fiercely attached to her parents but has trouble following instruction. The schoolhouse, Sunday school, and snotty Nellie Oleson give us Laura's first steps into a social world beyond the Ingalls' hearth. These domestic adventures are much more fun, I'm sure, for the intended elementary school aged readers.

As an adult, I'm more intrigued by Book #4's gentle approach to fundamentally scary topics like powerlessness, looming debt, Pa's devolution from independent homesteader to migrant farm laborer, the impotent anxiety of waiting for loved ones' return, and the too-close-for-comfort possibility of death. Between the creek, the swimming hole, the blizzards, the drought, and famine, death by Mother Nature is an omnipresent possibility. Truly, only those blessed with childlike faith in the future can thrive in such an environment.

Catastrophe and fear are tempered by Ma and Pa's can-do attitude. The safety of Laura's world rests on her parents' projected confidence; self-doubt or despair on their part would have been far more terrifying than any plague or plunge into poverty. Mishaps call for grit and resolve, never reevaluation or introspective course correction. The Ingalls have put themselves in a position where all they can provide for their daughters is cheerful forward momentum, whatever comes, and by gum they stick to it.

Which is good, because the other way to view this narrative is as an account of downward economic mobility and narrowly averted tragedy, all brought on by Pa's gratuitously risky choices and Ma's passive acquiescence. Thank goodness everything ends on a major key in children's books.

I loved reading this book while camping. I wasn't exactly in a prairie, but it was great to read this outside lost in the nature. This book was so sweet and charming, and its simplicity was refreshing after some other heavier books I was reading. I loved following Laura and Mary around their underground house, picking up plums and playing in the creek. I loved feeling happy for them when they made a button garland for Carrie's Christmas, or when they got a new cow. And I could sympathize and feel bad for them when their crop was destroyed by grasshopers, and Pa had to leave for many months to find work. It was such an easy, lovely book to follow and I put it down with a happy sigh of contentment when I finished. Classics like that are not to be missed; there is a special feel to the Little House books that is unique to them, and everyone should experience it.

Boy howdy is this a different experience reading it as an adult than reading it as a child.

This was my favorite book of the series when I was little, and I read it multiple times. I think I liked it because it had more of a story arc than the previous books. A lot of the book I did not remember, however. I missed that the settlement was full of Norwegian immigrants, probably because I couldn’t read the word Norwegian at the time. Ha! The book introduces the bratty, snobbish Nellie Oleson, who must’ve been equally fluent in Norwegian and English. (Isn’t -son Swedish and -sen Norwegian? I’m doubting if the name was spelled right in the book.)

The book begins with the family settling by Plum Creek near the town of Walnut Grove in southwestern Minnesota. (It glosses over the fact that their Kansas home in the previous book was not a legal settlement.) It covers nearly three years, where Laura is about age 7-10.

The book describes the Locust Plague of 1874. The description was really eerie and icky. It never impressed me much as a kid, but this time it was vivid and creepy.

Millions and millions of grasshoppers were eating now. You could hear the millions of jaws biting and chewing. … Grasshoppers were still falling from the sky. The light was still dim because grasshoppers covered the sun. … Their clothes were full of grasshoppers. Some jumped onto the hot stove where Mary was starting supper. Ma covered the food till they had chased and smashed every grasshopper. She swept them up and shoveled them into the stove.

This book taught me that pink goes with brown hair and blue goes with blonde hair. I had to look up “boughten” when the book described the house being built with “boughten shingles” and “boughten doors” and “boughten windows.” I think it just means store-bought or manufactured. And it was my first lesson in leeches.

Now that I’ve been studying the violin, I’m more impressed with Pa’s fiddle playing. He must’ve made his own rosin. How did he replace the strings? I can’t imagine making your own strings. And he had to tune by ear, so unless he had a tuning fork, he’d need perfect pitch. Fiddling is often dismissed as just for hillbillies, but it’s actually complex. It usually involves bowing two strings at once — not easy — AND often strumming a third string with a finger. That requires mad skillz.

I have mixed feelings about the audio narration by Cherry Jones. She does a good job and always sings the tunes so you can hear the melody (if it’s known). I’m just not a big fan of the timbre of her voice, I think.

Language: Clean
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: Descriptions of bugs and leeches are pretty gross
Harm to Animals: Attempted extermination of locusts. Locusts cause malnourishment in cattle and other animals. Spooked ox is beaten to keep it from running off a cliff.
Harm to Children: None
Other (Triggers): Bullying; financial instability

When I was a child, I related to Laura and Mary. Reading these as an adult is a whole new experience. I relate to Ma and Pa, and their fears and struggles. I cried listening to the audiobook this time around. CRIED!
Pa and Ma work so hard to establish themselves on the banks of Plum Creek, only to have their wheat field and garden demolished by grasshoppers. Those Norwegians knew what they were talking about when they called the summer "grasshopper weather." The struggle to simply exist and survive seems almost unimaginable compared to the modern luxuries I enjoy every day. I can't believe Pa almost died in a blizzard so close by to home. If I remember correctly from manuscripts, Ma was pregnant during all of this. What must she have been thinking, worrying her husband wasn't coming home? To be a widow with 4 children in those days would have been SO difficult.
In all the heartache, there are so many sweet moments too. I love the Town Party, Country Party stories. Nellie Oleson holds a special place amongst my book characters. Although I'm sure my perception of her is greatly influenced by the TV series I also loved as a kid. I love when Laura and Mary explore the Creek, and pick plums, and go to school. I love how they give up Christmas presents and treats to make sure that Pa can buy their Christmas horses. I love how the China shepherdess survives all of their moves across the country, and sits proudly on the mantel. I love how Laura gets a fur muff and cape, even BETTER than Nellie's.
This book is full of so much heartache and joy. It made me equally parts happy and sad. I will forever read and re-read this series. I can't wait until my children are old enough to love them too.

This one has some of the most memorable moments in the Little House series: the little dugout house, the cow putting his foot through the roof, leeches in the creek, locusts, doing chores by following a rope between the house and barn in a blizzard..... all those moments of life in a pioneering era of hardship and pure heart. Despite knowing how these stories turn out, I still get anxious for Pa coming home in the storm, or when trying to put out a prairie fire, and get grossed out by the leeches, cheer for Laura in her troubles with Nellie Oleson, and long to see the beautiful sunsets and sunrises described. Wilder tells stories with such remarkable narrative ability, you can't help but get deeply buried into each story. I look forward to reading these over and over again.
5/5

This has never been my favorite of the Little House books, but it's still a very good one. The descriptions of the struggles and simple joys of pioneer life are so beautifully written that you can truly feel the piercing heat of a summer day or the paralyzing cold of a blizzard. Brilliant writing and a wonderful series that I have read and reread so many times since my girlhood that I've lost count!

Rereading it this time, I enjoyed this part of the series more than I have in the past. I think I just end up comparing this one to some of the other books in the series that are my favorites, but this book stands on its own as a very good one!

After being forced to leave the house and land in Kansas, the Ingalls traveled by covered wagon north and ended up settled along Plum Creek in Minnesota not three miles from a town. There are many new experiences for Laura and her family from living in a Dugout home for a while until Pa can build them a house to attending school, a party, and church for the first time. There are the hardships of locusts devouring the crop and Pa forced to go east for work, the harsh blizzards, and Laura's first encounter with a childhood social issue with the snobby Nelly Olson.

It was full of excitement, daily life, and the new experiences of being closer to civilization than Laura has ever been even in Wisconsin. My heart ached for Ma as a few times she had to be terrified her husband wouldn't come home whether it was blizzard or far away walking journeys to find work and then all she had to deal with in his absence from prairie fires to all the farm chores and children to waiting out a blizzard and not knowing if her husband is dead or alive for days. Interesting, as I pointed out in reviewing an earlier book, how my listening focus was on her and pa rather than the narrator, Laura and the children in this adulthood re-listen.

Cherry Jones made me feel and see the story all the more with her magnificent narration work.

A classic children's story is timeless and enjoyed by adults as well.

This series was a staple of my childhood! It was a pure delight revisiting Plum Creek for a reading challenge this spring (2018). Truly, I now want to revisit each book in the series, from beginning to end. Such grand adventures Laura had! I hope my future children (if God so blesses me) will adore this book (and the rest) as much as I.

I was not compensated for my honest review.

It turns out Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote two horror novels and this is the one that's not The Long Winter. Not on the first read, but every subsequent read thereafter, a kind of spine-tingling dread appears every time someone mentions "grasshopper weather" and how hot the weather is, how great the wheat crops are going to be, because unlike the characters, the reader knows what's coming. I just about screamed at Pa's profligate spending on credit and kept waiting for Ma to put her foot down, but it seems I've gotten my canon mixed up: it's not Caroline Ingalls who does this (aside from a Demure Obedient Christian Wife passive-aggressiveness in not getting a new dress), but rather Laura Wilder, in the Rose series, who kicks up a fuss.

Treating all these as pure fiction, which the MacBride-written books almost certainly were to an even larger extent than the Little House series, I would love to draw a direct line between the two generations as to why Laura wouldn't allow Almanzo to buy her a fancy new stove - because the Laura in those books remembered the crushing debt her family lived under in these ones. *insert 'I've connected the two dots' 'You didn't connect shit' meme*

Honestly, despite these books holding a very specific nostalgic place in my readerheart, I've never thought of the prose as anything special, but good rabbit gravy the 'yell at the protagonists in a horror movie to get out of the basement' suspense at the still, hot summers before the plague of locusts... it's good stuff. And of course I still wish I lived in a little hobbit hole dugout. This seems important to mention somehow.

Odds and ends:
• Vanity cakes! Can't have a review without mentioning the vanity cakes. Reminded me of this Atlas Obscura article about Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. tl;dr readers who didn't know what TD was projected their own regional food vocabulary onto what such a treat might be. I did the same for vanity cakes. In my imagination, they were a cross between agedashi dofu, but more hollow, like aburaage? But square-shaped (reason: this is the shape the packets of fried tofu from the store came in). Even when I was listening to this now, I realized I was still picturing the vanity cakes as perfect cubes, but I don't think shape was ever specified in the books. If only I had known what sopapillas were back then, I know, I know.
• Every time I listen to Imogene Heap's Glittering Cloud, I always, at least briefly, think of this book.
• Historical tidbits: this one I think I understood even as a child owing to where I grew up, but a lot of the Ingalls' neighbors in the first few books are Scandinavian, and those books take place in the Wisconsin/Minnesota area, which still has a large concentration of Swedish/Norweigan/etc. descendants today. Good detail. Many of them do not speak English but then you have characters like Nellie Oleson, whose surname points to the same background but whose parents appear to be completely assimilated - but of course she is the most famous LH character who did not actually exist, as she was a composite of several different girls Laura didn't get on with. So no use trying to make her background make sense or murderboard her characterization. That's one for the fanfiction people, I reckon.
• Speaking of dense, after the second time the adults brought in the milk from the blizzard and there was almost no milk left in the pail because the wind blew it all out, I was like... dang, too bad no one's ever invented a covering for the top of a receptacle that would keep its contents inside! Too bad they didn't have the concept of lids in the 1800s! Someone should have invented that! Oh wait. You deserve your teaspoon of frozen milk then.

Audiobook: 6h25m, unabridged, read by Cherry Jones.