As a fifth generation South Dakotan, I loved rereading this book as an adult. Shortly after finishing, I made a trip to De Smet, SD. You can read about my experience and see pictures of the Wilder homestead on my blog: http://maryangelabooks.com/2019/08/pr...

Another enjoyable read. Laura is growing up and while the story is still kid friendly there are some more serious things that happened that made it less lighthearted than the previous book. A couple things early on even made me cry a little  Jack the dog's death and learning that Mary went blind due to an illness that occurred somewhere between this book and the last.  In spite of these sad things it was still interesting to see the way Laura is maturing and becoming more of a young lady and less of a little girl, get a taste for adventure and heading west, and help with the younger girls instead of being the main cause of mischief for once. I also thought it was very sweet how she has taken it upon herself to describe things to Mary to help her still experience the things she can no longer see.

Looking forward to more.

Content Advisory

A beloved but very old family pet dies in his sleep

Mention of members of the Ingalls family having contacted scarlett fever some time before the book started and one character having lost her sight to the fever.

There are threats of violence ranging from a possible bandit following the family's wagon (the attack never happens), to a mob of rowdy townspeople threatening Pa because he won't do what they want (but then leave without doing anything), to Ma having to tell the girls to stay upstairs because some men being boarded downstairs are drunk and causing a commotion (no one gets hurt), to fear of wolves being nearby.

What little actual violence occurs is not described and mainly includes a man physically holding off a bunch of other men (and enjoying himself doing it) so Pa can get inside a building to make a bid for some land, and Pa killing animals for food.

The closest thing to sexual/romantic content is Laura and another girl talking about how a girl not much older than them just got married and won't be able to have fun and play anymore. (Laura is only 12 or 13 at this point. ) Neither girl seems interested in marriage at this point, though they sing an innocent little song about wanting to marry a railway man instead of a farmer.

A very young child is feared to be missing at one point but  is later found unharmed

Another wonderfully written entry in the Little House series. I loved it as a kid and have equally loved it as an adult. Wilder continues to give us wonderful insight on the way she saw and remembered things as she grew up. This has always been one of my favorite entries because we start to see Laura growing up. And situations within her family such as her sister, Mary, now being blind, made her grow up quicker than some her age.

These books are a window into our past, and I am always so thankful that Laura Ingalls Wilder gave them to us.

I remembered so little of this book that I wonder if I even read the whole thing as a kid. I remembered Mary getting ill with scarlet fever and losing her sight, and I remember the new addition of Baby Grace. Regardless, this book feels very much like a transitional one in the Little House series. The font shrinks to the size of a normal book. The vocabulary becomes even more sophisticated, and this is the first book that seems to be driven more by Laura's personal development than by plot (since so much of the book is waiting for the town to be settled).

Early on, following the death of her beloved dog Jack, Laura realizes that now it's time to grow up, and throughout this book, she straddles the line between girlhood and adulthood (at this point, start humming "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" by Britney Spears). Laura is horrified early on when she sees a girl her age (twelve years old) married off. Luckily, Pa and Ma want more for their girls; although it's not the future Laura wants for herself, Ma hopes she'll continue the family tradition of becoming a school teacher. And although it seems too expensive, the family dreams about sending Mary to a college for the blind.

In By the Shores of Silver Lake, it becomes more clear than ever that Laura has inherited Pa's wanderlust, love of wilderness, and his daydreaming streak. She's not a conventional "young lady." It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few books.

I honestly don't know how Ma put up with Pa. I admittedly love the man but some of his schemes... Aside from personal nostalgia and the sheer pleasure of Ingalls Wilder's writing, it is fascinating to see the railroad built and towns rise up through her eyes.

"“Now you can look at a tree, Caroline. Your own tree. We’ll give each one of ’em a pailful of water after dinner. But first we’ll get their roots in the ground. Come, Mary, it’s your turn next.”"

I absolutely adore these trees and the idea of seeing these trees that still stand today and are huge. I wish I had had appreciation for these details when I visited as a girl.

"“It’s not my look-out,” said Pa. “My orders were to let the contractor take anything he wanted, and charge it to him. Oh, come, Caroline! It wasn’t stealing. Hi hasn’t got away with any more than’s due him for his work here and at the camp on the Sioux. The company cheated him there, and he’s got even here. That’s all there is to it.”

Damn Pa advocated stealing. Pa definitely was a bit shady.

"“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?” Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first. If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it’s pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.”

Another great one in the series. The writing has matured. I absolutely felt the restlessness and wanderlust of Pa and Laura. I hadn't felt that in years. I could also see the difference in Ma and Mary- they wanted to stay put; they wanted roots.
I wasn't sure I enjoyed Farmer Boy, but to be honest, it serves as a fantastic contrast to the lives of the Ingalls. And I felt a little thrill in By the Shores when I saw Almanzo's name first mentioned. The whiff of destiny, perhaps? That was fun.
With each book I see greater and deeper value in the series as a whole.
Oh, I came back to add that Jack's death had such an effect on me. Our dog died just this summer. Dogs and their faithful service are a great theme in this series as well.

Started on audio, finished in print.

The almost instantaneous transition from being essentially in isolation to being surrounded by noisy neighbors and incessant construction and development is striking and hard to conceive of in this day and age. There are a lot more worries in this book - and most of them are not about wolves of the lupine variety.

Man, oh man, again I start out feeling disappointed by Pa and Ma's life choices. Since we last left the Ingalls family, they have come down with scarlet fever and Mary is now blind. To be fair, they could have gotten sick any ol' place, but Pa, Plum Creek was clearly a bad decision for your family. Locusts, blizzards, BLINDNESS. The scary thing is, Laura's now 13, which means it's been a couple years since the last book left off. What the heck other crazy things happened that Laura doesn't want to tell us? Maybe nothing happened, life was boring those years, you say. I have serious doubts about that theory. Poor Laura.

Luckily, this book opens with Pa's sister who comes to the house and offers Pa a job with her husband's railroad business. Thank God--see, Pa, what can happen when you stick to family?

Then Jack the dog dies. OMG. This is so terribly sad. I kind of relied on Jack, like he was Nana from Peter Pan. He would at least take care of the children. RIP, Jack. I'm glad Laura fluffed your bed before you died.

Anyway, the family moves to follow the men who are building the railroad, and again, I'm worrying about the family because Laura and cousin Lena are allowed to run around like hooligans jumping on and falling off horses. Your first child is blind, are you at all worried your second one might break something? UGH.

I become pretty convinced reading through this book that after Jack dies, Laura's the one in the family that has to step up and keep things together. Like when Ma and Pa let Laura and Carrie play outside at night, Laura sees a wolf and without freaking out Carrie, hauls ass out of there, pulling her little sister along. When they burst into the house, Pa's 'aw, shucks, I thought those wolves were gone' reaction just slayed me. I felt like he had turned into Homer Simpson or something. And Mary, again, is blind, so Laura's the one always explaining things to her. And baby sister Grace wanders off and Ma and Pa do a whole, 'I thought she was with you' bit and run to the water to look for her, and Laura's the only one thinking, Where would I go if I was a baby? And then finds her of course.

Anyhoodle, for all that I'm making fun of them, I of course love the Ingalls family and these books. Christmas again was awesome, and when I really just felt like, Oh, you are the cutest, sweetest family ever. A couple of special moments: Driving to their homestead, Laura gets a glance at her future hubby Almanzo and his brother Royal. I wanted to give Laura a high-five and shout, "Oh yeah, get it, girl!"

Another moment from the beginning--as Pa is driving away to begin their new life, right after Jack's death: "Jack was not standing besides Laura to watch Pa go. There was only emptiness to turn to instead of Jack's eyes looking up to say that he was there to take care of her.
Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up."

I still like Farmer Boy a little bit better, but of the stories about the Ingalls family, this one is the strongest so far. Charles Ingalls is definitely the main character of the series. Through the absolutely adoring eyes of Laura, our narrator, we see what a kind and loving father he was. Based on the events of the series so far, he was really weird. Much more anti-social than a guy desperate for opportunity. In a society where women like the Ingalls women had almost no power, Charles dragged the five women in his family back and forth across the continent. And they loved him! And loved each other and made it work. It's an interesting series for an adult reader too.

This is the book in the series I re-read the least (yes, this ranked lower than These Happy Golden Years, which was emotionally incomprehensible to a grade schooler: all that getting married business, bor-ing!) and consequently some of the passages seemed entirely new to me. I'd forgotten them entirely. I'm not sure why I skipped over this one so often; it's the most violent of the books (there is a murder in town and camp riots) and there's just as much minutiae about building furniture as with the others. It's quite possible I couldn't get over the beginning, where Jack the dog dies of old age; I am nothing if not consistent. I'm not going to credit child-me with any understanding of the frequency of mentions of teen brides in this book, but good lord, were they foreshadowing Laura's later marriage or what the fuck even....

This transition between the earlier books and the books after this, where she's a full-on teenager/Young Lady, juxtaposes the imagery of the wide open prairie and the "unsettled"* land versus Laura's anxiety over growing up and the increasingly claustrophobic mentions of her future, and all the freedoms her child self has to give up in service to her family and the mores of the day. It's very strange and oppressive-feeling to read about the wild, free landscape even as Laura herself becomes less and less so.

This is also the book that has the strongest sense of time and place for me - the building of De Smet, the railroad camps where the men are laying down tracks out West, pins it down in history more precisely than the previous books in the series. All of this stuff is my jam, so I'm not sure why I agree with my younger self and found this book sort of weird. (Structurally it's definitely weak; it goes on for a few chapters longer than necessary after Grace wanders off and it's like, okay, we just thought a toddler got lost in the swamp grass and died, and now you expect me to care about nailing mosquito netting to your half a shack in the prairie?!? But that tracks with the other old timey descriptions of how to do stuff in the previous books, I guess.)

* The narrative kept mentioning the open land, how there's no one around, and there are a few mentions of the buffalo and the wolves that are no longer there. Why they are not there, and where any original settlers may have been, are never discussed, but it's this lurking specter of genocide & wholesale slaughter & the dark side of Manifest Destiny etc. that makes this book feel very unsettling to me, on re-read.

The chapter where they go "Oh my god we get to eat an entire half of a canned peach. as a treat" was still glorious, though.

Audiobook: Cherry Jones narrates this entire series, which makes me happy for consistency's sake. I discovered during this book that her singing voice changes depending on who is singing - Little House in the Big Woods was all Pa, so I was used to her gruff Pa voice, but then she also made a point to distinguish Mary and Laura's singing voices from each other, too, which was a delightful detail.

Alright... By the Shores of Silver Lake... You ready, Eleanor?

E: Mm-hmm.

Dad: Ok. Go for it.

E: Um. Well. My favorite paaaarrrrt waaaassssss.... hmmmmmmm... hmmm. hmmm. hmmm. Chapter 8? I thiiiink. I think, daddy. I think... uh... My favorite part was when they went out in the shanty, and when they got- do you want me to tell you the surprising part that I liked, or the regular part that I liked?

D: Start with the regular part.

E: My favorite parts were the ones with the littlest sister, Grace!

(Grace was introduced in chapter one. One of the first sentences says, "Mary, Carrie, and baby Grace..." Eleanor picked up on a funny thing though. They never actually say Grace is their sister. This was pretty frustrating for Eleanor, because she wanted to be CERTAIN that it WAS their sister before saying it. We talked about it being inferred, but that wasn't good enough for her. I had forgotten all about this, even though Eleanor brought it up quite a few times. It took all the way until page 180 before it was explicit: "And there on Ma's lap sat the littlest sister Grace, with her hair the color of sunshine, and eyes as blue as violets." When I read that part, El interrupted, shouting out "DAD! DAD!!! GRACE IS THEIR SISTER!!! Does this mean we don't have to infer anymore?")

(I just read what I wrote to Eleanor...)

E: Dad, I didn't mean to interrupt, I was just so surprised and shocked, I couldn't help it.

D: Yeah, don't worry about it. I love it when you get into the story. What other parts did you like in the book?

E: I liked when they talked about the Shepherdess, because they hadn't talked about her in a REALLY long time.

D: Anything else?

E: Something big happened to Mary, Laura, Carrie, Ma, and Pa! Men kept coming to their house, because theirs was the only house around. And they kept EATING AND EATING AND EATING.

OH! DAD?!?!

D: Yeah?

E: It's the review now, so why do they keep moving and moving and moving?

D: What do you mean?

E: Well, because... when we read that book - you said not to ask that question, and wait until the review to ask it.

D: Oh, yeah. It's a good question. They moved a LOT, didn't they?

E: Yeah. Why did they? Did Pa like to move or something? Why did they keep moving and moving and moving?

D: I think, if I were Ma, I would have been very frustrated about this. How many times did they move? Do you remember?

E: They moved in Little House on the Prairie, from Wisconsin to... the Prairie. And then to Independence, Missouri. And then to the Creek. And to the Wonderful House - that was book 5 - remember, Farmer Boy wasn't about them.

D: Yeah, yeah. You're right. Keep going.

E: Then, to the Shanty. Then to the surveyor's house. And then to the one with cracks. Then to their claim. So, it looks like the one with the surveyors was 6 - which means they've moved 8 times so far.

D: You are really good at keeping track of this. I'm not going to fact check you.

E: What's fact check mean? And why are the Big Woods called Wisconsin?

D: I'll get to that later. Give me a minute to be impressed with you. I would have forgotten a couple of those places.

E: DAD! You still didn't answer my question! Why did they move so much?

D: I don't know. But maybe it was because Pa was never content. Maybe he thought the grass was always greener on the other side. That means he thought life would be better somewhere else, even though it would have been just as good where they were. Like, Pa thought the wonderful house was going to be wonderful... but he didn't know about the grasshoppers... If they would have just stayed in the big woods, they would have had to dig out all those stumps, but they wouldn't have had to deal with the grasshoppers - you know?

I think Ma's the best character in the books.

E: Why?

D: She's very self-less. And I think it's very admirable to be self-less.

E: I like Grace more.

D: Why do you like Grace more?

E: I like Grace more, because she started out like a baby, like Carrie.

D: So, you like youth? Young people?

E: Yeah. I like them to start out young, and get older and get older and get older...

D: Our family has 3 little girls and up until now, their family had 3 little girls. Do you think we need to have another little girl now too?

E: I think so, because... who will be Grace? That's what I wanna know.

D: Well, who are the other kids, and tell me why...

E: Me, Gwennie, and Poppy. Poppy's is Carrie because she's 1. Gwen's Laura because she's 4. And I'm Mary because I'm 6 and the oldest and Mary and I are blind. And Mary sometimes bosses Laura around, and I sometimes boss Gwennie around. Will mom be mad if I put that in the review.

D: I don't think so.

E: And sometimes Gwennie tries to boss me around too. And sometimes Laura tries to boss Mary around too, even though Laura's younger.

D: So this was another good Little House book?

E: Mm-hmm. Lets add (laughs) The Long Winter to the currently-reading shelf.

D: Ok.

Read aloud to the kids. Landon gave it one grey circle, Seth gave it 2 stars , Naomi gave it ten million thousand stars