This book was, finally, refreshingly honest. I loved the previous 8 books, but was always a bit bothered at how Laura's true feelings were rarely described. Finally hearing about the boredom that Laura felt as a new mother, about how she didn't want Manly to be a farmer, and how she occasionally hated the stink of their farm stock was quite satisfying to me.

And, "Manly?" Two things about this nickname: first, have I been pronouncing his name incorrectly? Is it not "Ahl-MAHN-zoh?" Second, I wish we had read this sooner. So endearing and telling of their friendship-based relationship. What guy wouldn't want his nickname to be 'Manly?' ;)

As an adult, I now understand why these books are classics. In many ways, I wish I could go back and live as Laura did. Life was so hard, but so simple. People in her time avoided debt, valued self-education, and spent most of their lives working out doors. What wonderful ideals to strive for.

My daughter and I enjoyed it, just not quite as much as the others.

This was the "shit just got real" variation of the Little House series. I understand life was tough back then but this book was kind of jarring after all the pioneer whimsy of the other books. It was also awkward since it was just written out from a manuscript. It could definitely use a good edit.
It was interesting as well that Laura wrote herself as kind of a weaker person in this story. I know her daughter helped write the earlier books and the generation gap in the narrative voice really stuck out to me. Early Laura is sort of the strong female heroine archetype and this Laura doesn't want to think about money problems because that's a man's concern!

The two words that come to mind as I reflect upon this final book of the Little House Series are perseverance and, of course, grace. For after all the hardships of those first four years of life together, it was the enabling grace of God that gave them the spirit to happily keep pressing on. And after reading this for what is at least the second, but perhaps the third (maybe even fourth) time, I am once again reminded of why Laura is such a hero of mine.

This is the one book in the Little House series that I don't remember ever reading when I was younger. It is the final book in the series and was never properly completed. It was published after her death and was mostly in journals and the beginnings of a transcript. I loved it, it made me feel even closer tothe true person Laura Ingalls once was.

This final book in the LH series is not as optimistic. Almanzo and Laura's first four years of marriage were tough. It stressed me out every time they would borrow money!
I read it with Naomi and Julia and they enjoyed it.

2020 A book of your choice

For fans of The Little House series, I recommend stopping after Book 8. This manuscript was discovered much later and was published unedited after both Laura and Rose died. It does have a much different feel to it. Laura seems bitter to be the wife of a farmer (!) and she is also a bit obsessed about money matters and debt. "How could she ever keep up the daily work and still go through what was ahead. There was so much to be done and only herself to do it. She hated the farm and the stock and the smelly lambs, the cooking of food and the dirty dishes. Oh, she hated it all, and especially the debts that must be paid whether she could work or not." Almanzo is now called Manly. The book describes their first four years of married life, through ruined crops, fires, sickness and the birth of Rose.

I will miss this series. I never read it as a child and devoured it as an adult.

Roger Lea MacBride's introduction shouldn't be skipped over. It explains the stark difference in tone, structure, and outlook compared to the other Little House books. In a slim 134 pages, Wilder covers four years (compare this to The Long Winter). The chapters are divided by years instead of key events or themes. Time passes rapidly, shifting without much warning from topic to topic. After all, it's a draft of a story that Laura "had penciled...in three orange-covered school tablets." MacBride speculates that "after Almanzo died she lost interest in revising and completing it for publication." It seems a worthy guess. There is some overlap with the ending of These Happy Golden Years, to orient the reader. And yet, I really do think These Happy Golden Years was crafted to be an end to the series, with its final tone. Was publishing this book motivated by finances or a desire to satisfy readers' curiosity? Probably both.

Each chapter is one year in the attempt that Laura and Almanzo make at farming. As they struggle and disasters strike, newlywed Laura starts to calculate the debts that they owe, what their annual profit is, etc. Laura the character is feisty and determined to succeed, even as she worries. Wilder the writer still relies on song lyrics and adages to use as hooks--"the rich get their ice in the summer"--to help bind together themes. However, she glosses over some of the more difficult aspects of her life, including the death of her unnamed son.

Almanzo, forever the Farmer Boy, is determined to make it work. Laura is driven by the pioneering spirit, struggling with the itch inherited from her father, that "it is better farther on." Even in what seems to be a quick draft, there is room for discussion of her literary merit and structure. The characters aren't nearly as well developed in this draft, but they have some personality that can be fleshed out with knowledge of the previous books.

Who should read this book: fans of the Little House series, people who read posthumously published novels, those curious about farming life in the nineteenth century.

Things take a dark turn. This was not the romanticized, revisionist pandemic escape I was looking for.

This book is a summary of Laura's difficult first four years of marriage. It was published after her death, and the author, as far as I've been able to learn, never planned to publish it. The book lacks the spunky, go-getter, optimistic spirit that permeated the earlier books. In the earlier books, Laura details travails her family faced, but there was always a sense of security, a feeling that things would be OK because of her parents or because of her own independent spirit. That optimistic, likeable personality is gone in this book, which was left unedited and, therefore, was likely closer to the truth. The Laura of The First Four Years is practical, pragmatic, no-nonsense, fixated on money, and weary. Life is hard and there's no sugarcoating it. There's a snide allusion to sex, one tragedy after another, and a Laura Ingalls who worries about money and how the bills will get paid. This book doesn't quite work for children, but it also doesn't work for grownups. There is a lot of summarizing in the Little House books; most of the books have a loose plot, if they have a plot at all -- but this book is literally basically a condensed list of the happenings of four years. The seasons melt one into another, and within less than 100 pages, four years are gone, just like that, and Laura and Almanzo are worse off than they were when they got married.

So, after reading Farmer Boy, I commended the Wilder family for their financial prudence and responsibility compared to the Ingalls family, but in turns out Almanzo bought a bunch of stuff he couldn't afford and took out thousands of dollars in loans...often without telling Laura. These were different times so it's not far to judge Almanzo with modern norms, but, Manly, I expected more!!! To me, Manly comes across as kind, if a little slow and naïve. I assume that early on in her marriage, it dawned on Laura that she would be spending the rest of her life with a man far beneath her in intellect, and that realization must have contributed to her frustrations.

There were still great descriptive passages here. Throughout the series, I love the way Ingalls describes the Prairie, the task of dressmaking, the along, arduous walks through the snow (so many snowstorms across all these books!), etc. Perhaps one of my favorite passages was the following: "For several days, the wild geese hurried southward; and then one still, sunny afternoon a dark cloud line lay low on the northwest horizon. It climbed swiftly, higher and higher, until the sun was suddenly overcast, and with a howl the wind came and the world was blotted out in a blur of whirling snow." It's these kinds of passages, these apparently effortless descriptions of wilderness, weather, landscape, that draw me back to the Little House series over and over.

One thing I have to say about this book: It really pushed me into a Little House Spiral. You get a sense of Laura Ingalls as a real, flawed person (which is probably why it's so different), and whatever romantic notions you clung to about her personality and life vanish pretty tidily. Will I eventually become one of those women who visits Rocky Ridge Farm and De Smet, South Dakota on a Laura Ingalls Wilder Pilgrimage? Maybe, minus the homeschooling and the survivalist mentality (apparently these two factions represent a large portion of the LIW super fan groups, per my Google research). I'm now very interested in her daughter Rose, Laura's collaborator and editor, who contributed heavily to the series. I feel psychologically ready to take on Caroline Fraser's "Prairie Fires."

I'm not 100% sure what exactly draws me back to this series over and over again, but as soon as I fished the ninth and final book, I found myself borrowing the first book from the library all over again. One thing I find so fascinating about LIW's life is that she went from living in a dugout in "On the Banks of Plum Creek" (one of my favorites in the series, btw), making her own clothes and basically living an off-the-grid, primitive, old-time existence, to owning a car and flying on planes. It's hard for me to imagine the author of this series experiencing such modern inventions, because the books themselves are so distinctly in the far off past.

Laura and Almanzo work hard at farming through their first four years of marriage. They can never seem to get ahead with their debts for farming equipment. Just when they think they will have a good crop of wheat, the weather turns nasty and ruins all their hopes. Their daughter Rose is born and brings them a lot joy, but they also have heartaches and disaster strikes their little farm. Still, they are unified in their love and in their determination to triumph over nature and make their farm a success.

I love how Laura uses Almanzo's nickname "Manly" in this book. So adorable! It's so sweet to see how they care for each other and work hard to support each other through illness and pain, through happy times of celebration, and through everything in between.

Almanzo is doing his best, but he's not very smart with money. I think he is used to having a prosperous farm like his parents did, and he wants to provide those riches for his new family. But Laura is used to living in squalid conditions on the prairie and being content with very little, so she is more careful with money. The debt seems to weigh more heavily on her mind than it does for Almanzo.

This book is my least favorite in the series, because it has so many disasters and heartaches one after another. The happy times seem to be few and far between. They are sick and people die and they lose part of their claim. There are fires and tornadoes and blizzards and drought. It's just so depressing.

This book is also different from the other books in the series because the author never finished revising and editing it. These are just her preliminary notes for the book, and so the book is not complete. The writing doesn't flow like the other books, and it's much shorter than the other books too.

I read this book when I was a child and was shocked and disappointed by it. The tone is very flat and Laura and Almanzo seem like different people. It seems more of an outline than a full-fledged Little House book. I almost didn't re-read it this time to finish out my re-reading of the entire series, but I decided to steel myself to the task, and I'm actually glad I did. I knew what I was getting into, so it wasn't so shocking and disappointing this time around.

This book begins by re-telling the end of These Happy Golden Years, but this time before they are married, Laura tells Almanzo she doesn't want to be a farmer's wife. How's that now? She feels farming is too difficult and they will always be poor, but Almanzo convinces her to try it out for three years. The couple starts out happily enough, racing their ponies on the prairie and enjoying being newlyweds, but even before the first year is over the tragedies start piling up right along with the growing debt. The first four years were pretty awful.

Almanzo, who seemed so smart and prosperous throughout the entire series, makes horrible financial decisions, and Laura, who doubts the wisdom of what he's doing, lets him do it because "that's his business." (Granted, she's writing about these first four years 60 years after they happened, so she might be turning her hindsight into foresight...) When hail destroys their first wheat crop before it is harvested, he suggests they use the hail to make ice cream, and Laura is thoroughly disgusted with him.

Also, it is revealed here that Almanzo did not build her that fabulous pantry in their house. He hired a carpenter to do it for him. And twice in the first year of marriage Laura orders things from the Montgomery Ward catalog, which just seems downright weird. It's as if this book showcases the reality of the pioneer/settlers life much more so than the first 8 books in the series do. This book lets you see that the first 8 books were idealized and sanitized, which doesn't make me love them any less, but it's kind of like finding out there's no such thing as Santa.

This was apparently published posthumously and unfinished - it’s so much better than the rest of the series as an adult reader. It’s as if it didn’t have time to have all the hard bits hidden or made to sound cheerful. It’s a brutal four years of the beginning of their marriage. Farming is hard and they never catch a break. They are in debt. Their son dies. Laura accidentally burns the house down.

This is by far the most real feeling of the series and feels like a great bridge into Prairie Fires.