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As a child Farmer Boy was by far my favorite Little House book, and I'm not even sure how many times I've read it over the years. It was a treat to share it with my children this time around. I enjoyed their enjoyment in entering this world for the first time, and privately I enjoyed the realization that it's an even richer world to me as an adult than it was as a child.
What I love best is how the cycles of work on the farm provide the framework for the book. There are other minor themes, like Almanzo's longing for a colt, his friendship with Alice, and his rivalry with cousin Frank. But it's the ploughing and planting, harrowing and harvesting, cutting ice and timber, making soap and candles and butter, sugaring and shearing, shucking and threshing, butchering and berrying that drive the narrative. When you add visits from the tinker and cobbler, Mother's weaving and dressmaking, and Father's carpentry, the book offers quite a complete report of how almost everything used or consumed by the family is raised or made. Between episodes of work, there are holidays and special events like the county fair or the week the children run the farm alone in their parents' absence. And in almost every chapter we get to enjoy, almost as much as Almanzo, a rich spread of food as immediate reward for the labor. The interplay between work and celebration, labor and feasting is a beautiful feature of the book.
On this reading, I was charmed and impressed by the author's attention to detail and the insistence on giving a complete chronicle of production on the farm. In some cases, the narrative keeps returning to subsequent steps in the same process as the year unfolds: we hear about Father sowing wheat in the spring, then, many chapters later in the late summer, everyone participates in the reaping and shocking, later still during the snowy winter Almanzo helps father thresh and winnow the grain, and finally, at the end of the book, they bale and sell their surplus hay. The potato and corn crop receive similar treatment. Even the ice cut from the pond in winter and packed away in sawdust comes up later in the story, enabling the Wilder children make several batches of ice cream while their parents are away. It makes for quite a tight plot -- though it's not really a plot at all so much as a farm family's calendar.
In many ways, I find this childhood favorite even more delightful now that I can analyse its structure and beauties as an adult. But having read Little House on the Prairie quite recently, I'm going to have to betray my younger self and say that, actually (and surprisingly), Farmer Boy isn't nearly as good a book. The characters are flatter, the pacing is less even, the interior world of the title character is less developed. It's still a fabulous book, but not the absolute tour de force that Little House on the Prairie is.
What I love best is how the cycles of work on the farm provide the framework for the book. There are other minor themes, like Almanzo's longing for a colt, his friendship with Alice, and his rivalry with cousin Frank. But it's the ploughing and planting, harrowing and harvesting, cutting ice and timber, making soap and candles and butter, sugaring and shearing, shucking and threshing, butchering and berrying that drive the narrative. When you add visits from the tinker and cobbler, Mother's weaving and dressmaking, and Father's carpentry, the book offers quite a complete report of how almost everything used or consumed by the family is raised or made. Between episodes of work, there are holidays and special events like the county fair or the week the children run the farm alone in their parents' absence. And in almost every chapter we get to enjoy, almost as much as Almanzo, a rich spread of food as immediate reward for the labor. The interplay between work and celebration, labor and feasting is a beautiful feature of the book.
On this reading, I was charmed and impressed by the author's attention to detail and the insistence on giving a complete chronicle of production on the farm. In some cases, the narrative keeps returning to subsequent steps in the same process as the year unfolds: we hear about Father sowing wheat in the spring, then, many chapters later in the late summer, everyone participates in the reaping and shocking, later still during the snowy winter Almanzo helps father thresh and winnow the grain, and finally, at the end of the book, they bale and sell their surplus hay. The potato and corn crop receive similar treatment. Even the ice cut from the pond in winter and packed away in sawdust comes up later in the story, enabling the Wilder children make several batches of ice cream while their parents are away. It makes for quite a tight plot -- though it's not really a plot at all so much as a farm family's calendar.
In many ways, I find this childhood favorite even more delightful now that I can analyse its structure and beauties as an adult. But having read Little House on the Prairie quite recently, I'm going to have to betray my younger self and say that, actually (and surprisingly), Farmer Boy isn't nearly as good a book. The characters are flatter, the pacing is less even, the interior world of the title character is less developed. It's still a fabulous book, but not the absolute tour de force that Little House on the Prairie is.
