I'm having a lovely time reading through this series and I wish I hadn't waited so long to continue it. This book opened up rather bleakly with the news of Mary's blindness and their entire family suffering from sickness. I know prairie times were rough, but ooh what an opener. Laura is getting older and has to take more responsibility. I was glad to see her move on from her naughty childhood but felt bad for her circumstances. Luckily, Baby Carrie has grown up to help her out and another girl has joined the birth line with Baby Grace. I am really enjoying this series and reading all her trials on the wild prairie. I saw a brief cameo of Alamanzo passing by and I am frothing for them to finally start courting. I think they'll be a good match, personality-wise, and I'm eager to see their relationship blossom. This series is wonderful and a welcome respite from the heavier books I've been reading lately. I won't be jumping on any wild horses in the near future so I'll just let Laura take the lead on that one...

This has always been my least favorite of the series and I stand by that on this re-read.

Read to Meg (11) and Kate (7). The first two chapters have sad developments, and the following chapters include almost painfully long descriptions of landscapes, machines, and household tasks. The family is isolate for most of the book. It occasionally lost the girls' attention, and I don't blame them much. Although I was a huge fan of the series as a child, I do not remember this one being a favorite. While 3 stars may be too generous, one redeeming quality is that the book captures Laura's transition from a happy child to the adult she will become. The reader sees that Laura's life will be defined in a large way by her sister's blindness.

2022 reread: I think I appreciated Laura's growth throughout the course of the series more now Thani once did. This book really shows how she is changing and maturing. Not a whole lot happens in this book, but I still loved the romantic outlook on the frontier life.

Quite a transitional and paradigm-shfiting book in the series—Laura grows out of childhood, the Ingalls family settles down, and for the first time, the world is unmistakably one of the 19th century—that seems like a beautiful silver pin holding together the three earlier and three later installments.*

Though my children begged me to read it last summer, right after Plum Creek, I held off because I wasn't sure how well they would respond to the different tone and circumstances of this volume. When we did finally begin, I was curious to see how they would react—Laura is now 13, much older than any of them, and assuming many adult responsibilities in the household; Mary is blind; Jack dies. Everything seems to have changed at the beginning of the book.

But my three children found, as I remember finding when I first read the book, enough to compensate for these sad or uncomfortable changes. Perhaps the real consolation is that, despite so many alterations, much more stays the same—Laura's zest for life, Pa's cheerful optimism, Ma's loving caution, the sisterly bond between Laura and Mary, a newer bond with Carrie, the music of the fiddle, the comfort of family life and the ability to make a home and cook excellent food whatever the odd living arrangements.

Everyone says that one of the main events of 19th-century America is the building of the railroad that linked east to west. You can hardly find a better dramatization of this watershed than Silver Lake. The story opens with the family riding a train for the first time, Pa is employed by the railroad commission, and the family lives for a few months in a railroad camp. Scarcely has the railroad been built, but east moves west, and those symbols of 19th-century civilization emerge: Laura encounters magazines and serialized stories, Pa teaches his daughters to dance, the Ingallses and their friends sing together—in parts!—with great enthusiasm, they have a prayer meeting when itinerant preachers visit, and they learn about the seminary for the blind that Mary ends up attending. It's fun to see how even on the yet-unsettled prairie with only one neighbor for 60 miles, the family begins to have much closer contact with the culture of the eastern states—far more than in the first two Little House books, and more even than in Plum Creek—a trend that will continue in the remaining books of the series.

In fact, it's this blend of emerging eastern culture and the wilder pioneer culture (each personified by one of Laura's parents) that makes the whole series so fascinating. There is a constant trend toward greater civilization, and that is the way that Ma always pulls the family, but there are many setbacks along the way as Pa changes his mind, the family loses prosperity, or the weather interferes. (The most surprising, though the most temporary, setback is in The Long Winter, which sees the Ingalls family, though settled in a town with a railroad, cut off from all civilization and reduced to lower standards of living than ever before by unremitting blizzards.)

Silver Lake is also transitional in that it sets the stage for Laura's adult life. She begins to ponder (with dread and eventual acceptance) the vocation as teacher that she will pursue in the following volumes. And I think the book also invites, very quietly, speculation about her eventual marriage. West and east seem to vie for her allegiance when she learns of the marriage of a 14-year-old friend of her cousin; she and Lena sing lots of romantic songs as they milk cows, and they discuss the idea of early marriage, raising the possibility that Laura and Lena might both end up as very young pioneer brides. But Ma again pulls Laura back into what feels like eastern sanity; we hear no more of Lena and her half-wild lifestyle. But by the end of the book a glimpse of Almonzo—and his horses—whispers of Laura's eventual marriage, three books later, that will take place at the much more civilized age of 19.

Altogether, Silver Lake strikes me as a wondrously rich book that maintains the threads of all earlier books while introducing some dazzling new threads. And it might be my favorite in the whole series—except I think that about every book I reread with my children. (I will have to content myself by declaring the whole Little House series my favorite series.)


* Here I exclude Farmer Boy from the set of earlier volumes, since it doesn't tell Laura's story. I always exclude The First Four Years from the later volumes, since it is so very inferior to the others: unrevised, posthumously published, and never meant, in the state it was left in, to be part of the series.

I might've read some of the Little House on the Prairie books when I was younger, but I don't really remember. To be honest, I don't think I will read the other books, I just read this one because it's been sitting on my shelf for a long time. This book is nice, but it doesn't hold a lot of true weight, and I now this was written in 1939, but sometimes, the characters' tones and the things they said didn't sit well with me. But overall, it was a good read!

"What I liked about this story is that they found a new home and that they wouldn't have to move ever again. It was hard work in my mind imagining all the new houses they had. I also liked that they went ice skating on Silver Lake. What I don't like was that they saw a buffalo wolf. I'm so glad they ran for their lives." -Cadee, age 8

"Now can we start the next one? Maybe Almanzo and Laura will get married in it."

Following On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake picks up with the Ingalls family just having gone through Scarlet Fever following the destruction of their crops from the grasshoppers and new sister Grace added to the family. Mary is blind, Carrie is weakened, and Pa must take a job working for the railroad building crew as their paymaster and store keeper to make ends meet until he can choose a homestead for them out in Dakota Territory.

Laura is thirteen now and wavers between feeling the wild need to free-spirited childhood and the growing responsibility and mature behavior of adulthood. Ma and Pa need her hardworking hands and can-do spirit more than ever. First, she helps ma close up the Plum Creek house and they and the other girls ride the rails west for the first time. Then she helps with their household in the shanty. There are moments are real danger out on the wild prairie where rough men are working to lay the tracks or moving west. Then there is the fear that pa might not beat the spring rush to lay claims and then the danger of claimjumpers. There are joys and sad moments and happy and tensions that made for a fabulous series installment.

Without a hint of preachiness, Wilder succeeds in writing a story in which people are cheerfully overcoming difficulties and loving each other unselfishly. (How refreshing to read a story with none of the self-absorbed angst of modern Christian fiction!)

In addition to the gentle life lessons, there is plenty of adventure with wolves, blizzards and claim jumpers.

And the simple eloquence of Wilder's prose is lovely.

I don't think I will ever grow tired of these stories. I love them too much. Oh, what adventures they had.

I am not finding the love. I read these books over and over as a kid. I see their value as historical documents. I'm this far in the series and I'm going to stick it out, but when I finish, I suspect the hardcover set that has taken up a fair bit of shelf space in my library is going to be out on its ear.

Pa's a bit less annoying in this book, but Ma steps up the to the plate with her endless shushing and what is up with all of a sudden they are having church services all over the place? Laura's got less backbone every book. And Mary's a saint, Carrie's a whiner and Grace is a cipher.

This book and series has been such a joy to read to my daughters. The history and the details are my favorite part. We learned what a claim jumper is. We laughed out loud and repeatedly and enjoyed this book very much. I highly recommend this series!