Where I got the book: my daughter's bookshelf.

Finally did it, folks. Read that American childhood classic everyone else but me seems to have read. Of course I didn't grow up in America so I have an excuse!

And I liked it. Almost ran upstairs for the next one. Sure, the Indians are portrayed as savages who steal and threaten, and the Ingalls family (who had set up housekeeping illegally in the Indians' territory) make absolutely no attempt to understand or really communicate with them. But that's a pretty typical portrayal of the mindset of white settlers, who believed in their Manifest Destiny to overrun the land, that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, that they were biologically superior and that they would "improve" the land they lived on. All books written in the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect those unpalatable attitudes; our 21st century attitude is to feel outraged because we consider ourselves superior to our ancestors, but I don't suppose many of us would seriously consider inviting the tribes back into our suburbs. Perhaps our great-grandchildren will.

And if the Ingalls family were anything to go by, those settlers were as ballsy as they were naive. They appear to have survived that year on the prairie mostly by dumb luck. If nothing else, this little book gives you an idea of the difficulties and dangers of homesteading and portrays just how frightening the plains must have appeared to the hapless women and children who got dragged into their menfolk's big adventure. I bet Ma Ingalls breathed a huge sigh of relief as they left the Little House behind.

This is my umpteenth time reading this book, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did when I was a girl! There's a simple charm to these stories of pioneer life that invites you in.

As always, Laura is my favorite character because she is spunky and brave and hilarious, while her sister Mary is prim and boring.

Pa is another favorite, because he is a musician, and because his funny and jovial ways remind me of my own father. Laura says that "Pa always laughed out loud and his laugh was like great bells ringing." haha! Wonderful!

In this book, the Ingalls family is settling in Indian Territory, building a log cabin, digging a well, and plowing the land for fields of corn. But the Indians are close by and some of them are dangerous.

This book contains the most famous scene of the entire series, when Mr. Edwards swims across the raging creek to bring Laura and Mary Christmas gifts that he claims Santa Claus asked him to deliver. When I was a kid reading this, I never realized or thought about how the adults are reacting in the scene. I was focused on the children getting their gifts.

Now reading as an adult, I see it so differently, knowing the extent of the sacrifice Mr. Edwards had made and the danger he went through. "Pa shook Mr. Edwards' hand, and shook it again. Pa and Ma and Mr. Edwards acted as if they were almost crying, Laura didn't know why."

The adults are overwhelmed by emotion at seeing their children so happy with their presents, and they are relieved that Christmas is not ruined. Is there anything more powerful for an adult than to see children happy at Christmas, knowing the sacrifice that it cost?

The author is brilliant at bringing an emotion to the forefront with very few words. I adore all these books!

I really liked these books for read out loud at night to my kids and my nieces.
Yes, we had to talk about how Native Americans were portrayed, and yup it gave us a whole bunch to research during the day, and why people
at that time held certain views and how those views shaped the world around them.
At the same time there were a whole bunch of good story telling.

Ahh, such happy classics. I am so looking forward to reading these to my own kids, someday! :)

2023 - Rereading with a podcast (Wilder on the Prairie,) this time the political themes, Pa's self-inflicted struggles, and Ma's racism were much more in the forefront and difficult to overlook in the name of nostalgia.

I was interested to discover that I didn't have the visceral remembrance of each page and incident that I had of "Big Woods", but that certainly doesn't mean that I didn't know what would happen in each chapter. It's interesting to contemplate Ma's instructions to the girls about what being "good" means, and the relationship between Ma and Pa.
I couldn't stop crying while reading the book, I have no idea why. It made for a sniffly workout this morning

A lovely written, and yet strangely sad book.

5 Stars ✨

Nothing like Little House on the Prairie, it’s such a great wholesome story for the whole family to enjoy. I enjoyed reading it aloud to my kids. This was used in our homeschool curriculum as a living book for history and life skills. It’s great for conversation starters and talking about history and learning the ways people used to live . It’s full of so many great lessons . This was a reread for me and I always enjoy going back to this series. It’s great for traveling back in time to in my opinion, to a better sweeter time where our world was simple and better place

I recently read this to my young son, and he couldn't get enough. He's a kid who loves nothing more than to spend all day in the woods building forts, so perhaps it's not surprising that he took to this book. It's a marvelous adventure story that left me in awe of the sheer indefatigable competence of this family. The relationship of the family to the natural world--the great prairie that they move to--is fascinating, as is their relationship to the Indians. Then again, "fascinating" did, on a rare occasion, turn into something overtly racist in the case of the Indians. I struggled with what to do about those passages. They were mostly the characters speaking, so one approach would have been to read it and then pause to critique, but I wasn't sure my son was quite old enough to appreciate that. So I took the easy way out. I skipped over those passages. I'm still uncertain whether this was the right thing to do. Perhaps in the future we'll revisit this and can have a fuller discussion.

I expected to be inspired by the tales of simple pioneering life. I did not expect the fear of Indians and being massacred to be a significant theme and I found I skipped bits when reading this to my young children.

A honey-covered lullaby of a book! Yum! Slurp! Racism never went down so good! Beautifully written, and read aloud by a champ -- but Whoa, Bessie! -- even the characters express a smidgen of ambivalence about wresting land from the natives. "Won't the Indians be mad, Pa?" And what's with the child wanting her father to steal a Native American baby for her?

In this third installment to the Little House series the Ingalls family packs up and heads west toward Kansas. This journey brings adventure but also multiple dangers along the way.

This book was definitely my least favorite yet. I personally didn't like the events that were happening with the Native Americans and also some of the dangers the family faced. I understand the time period, but this was just not as enjoyable as the first book. I even found it weird at times. However, it was written well, and we enjoyed Cherry Jones narrating along with the physical book again, which I highly recommend if you're reading this with children.

In the end my son wanted to go with four stars, my daughter zero stars, and I was right around three stars with this one. We'll settle in with three this time around. We ended up skipping the second book Farmer Boy and will likely go back and read that one next.

***

My reread as an adult. Absolutely terrifying scenes washed through the eyes of a child in a settler family, having been recalled by herself as an old woman.

Also, abolutely beautiful scenes of the prairielands of the US (Kansas? Missouri?) as the ethnic cleansers first encountered them. Charles Ingalls could build a log cabin out of any group of trees he could find (let the deforestation of the creeklands commence), build a chimney, dig a well, and blithely expose his children to all manner of dangers in the hopes of becoming a rich and prosperous farmer. The one thing you can say for Charles and Caroline is that they had no wish to resort to capturing or killing other people - but over the course of the book the children nearly die of : drowning while crossing a river, wolf attacks (the wolves' natural prey of bison having been wiped out by the vanguard of ethnic cleansers), malnutrition (fortunately Ingalls met a man with a cow), malaria (watermelons? and they are saved by an African-American doctor) prairie fire, backlash massacre (which Caroline rightly fears) from the population they are telling to "move on". Never mind, that plowing up all of that lush prairie grass will lead to massive erosion of topsoil and the Dust Bowl event 60 years later. Are we all always so short-sighted in our own participation in dreadful historical progressions?

I loved these books as a child - but this volume in particular needs to be examined under the broader scope of history.

There is open and frank racism with some nuance. An Osage man becomes the one named "Indian" who has undoubtedly saved their lives. Laura records her child-feelings accurately. For me, there is an undercurrent of melancholy and time which often is a portent of great art, augmented by my adult knowledge that it will all be a spectacular and misguided failure. (At the same time, the Wilder family in New York, who owned the sort of prosperous farm Ingalls dreamt of, is experiencing economic devastation that will drive them West - where Laura and Almanzo will later meet -- not in this book - but now within my adult comprehension.)

None of these things detracted from my pleasure in the rereading.

I am not normally given to sentimentality, but 50 years later, the meeting of Mr. Edwards with Santa Claus still makes me weep.
And - Jack was a good dog.