n  

How would you like to work in town, Laura?

n
When Mary lost her sight, she lost all hope of continuing her education. A kindly reverend tells the Ingalls family of a college for the blind. It goes without question that Mary will attend the seven years of school.

Now, the Ingalls family desperately needs money to cover school costs for Mary. Laura takes up work in town - sewing buttons of all things. While she hates it, she wants Mary to go to college far mor. The Ingalls family's crops are set upon by great swarms of pests.

And, to top it all, Eliza Jane (Laura's future sister-in-law) teaches their one-room school - and she's terrible at it. No discipline, belittling students and extreme favoritism. Even Laura cannot stand her. When Eliza Jane unjustly punishes Carrie, Laura escalates until she is thrown out of school.

Laura gets the last laugh. She pens this poem and publishes it in her autobiographical novel - for thousands of children to read and remember:

n  Going to school is lots of fun,
From laughing we have gained a ton,
We laugh until we have a pain,
At Lazy, Lousy, Lizy Jane.n

She is my petty-revenge goals.

Audiobook Comments
Read by Cherry Jones and accompanied by Paul Woodiel on the fiddle. Love this dynamic duo!

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Such an amazing classic ❤

I have read this perhaps for the third time in my life. I needed to read a book in a series and of course it seemed that a Laura Ingalls Wilder book would be perfect. Having not read one in hmm, almost 30 years I wasn't sure if it would be as wonderful as I remembered. It was! In fact it was one of the most enjoyable reading that I have had for a long time. I now want to continue on and see what happens with Laura now being certified as a teacher. Her books will always be a favorite of mine and I hope that my granddaughter when she becomes of reading age will read them.

Is it a children’s book? Yes. Is it problematic? Yes. Do I love it? Yes. Laura Ingalls Wilder were my favorite books growing up, before Harry Potter came out especially, and now I find them so simple and soothing, the relationships are so lovely, the descriptions of nature soothe my soul, and this is absolutely the source of my love of slice of life historical fiction. In fact you could definitely trace a lot of things I like to these books. They had a real impact on my growing up.

I’m reading a hard book that I needed a break from, and this is perfect. Just needed something simple and sweet.

Whenever I read this series when I was little, I'd always get sad by the time I got to this book, because Laura and everyone else were getting older and it felt sad that she was growing out of things. (And now I get even more sad because I've realized, like, "Ah!! That's me!!")

Yet another great book in the series! They just keep getting better and better! I simply can’t learn enough about this family, town, and their way of life.

"I liked this book because they got ready for another bad winter and it wasn't lots of snow storms like the year before that. Laura still likes Almanzo's horses and he likes to take her on walks. But not like a dog. Like a date." -Cadee, age 8

I kind of don’t know how to deal with the casual racism in these books. The minstrel show in the chapter “The Madcap Days” appals me as an adult. As a child, living in Jamaica, sharing homes with Jamaican families and running in a pack with Jamaican kids, I actually didn’t know what the “darkies” of this chapter were supposed to be. Clearly they were men making music and singing, their faces disguised with black polish. I neither knew nor would have understood what they were supposed to be. They might as well have been Morris dancers or chimney sweeps. I don’t think this excuses what’s going on here, but I do think it shows that A) what you read doesn’t necessarily damage you for life, and B) children are very good at blocking out the things they don’t get. I wish it wasn't like this: but the book was published in 1941 and is set in 1882, so we're stuck with it.

And for a long time, as a child, this book was my favorite of the series. In many ways it’s straight-up YA, though it was published so long ago. I’m astonished, now, at how much of the book is focused on Laura being dissatisfied with her looks and struggling to be stylish. Some of the little conversations about style are wonderful – Ma is constantly, gently disapproving of Laura’s newfangled notions, and Laura does a fair bit of eye-rolling over Ma’s old-fashionedness. The crowd of high school kids sledding together, jockeying for social position, experimenting with electricity, eying up each other’s clothes, the first hints at romance, Laura’s burn-out with school, are absolutely timeless. The battles with Eliza Jane Wilder and Nellie Oleson are so frustrating and yet so satisfying, and Laura is no angel. (I love that when she writes the mean verse about Eliza Jane she excuses herself: “She meant only to please Ida, and perhaps, just a little, to show off what she could do.” I know this feeling so well. Also – wow, her verse GOES VIRAL! The innocence with which the teasing starts and the anonymous rapidity with which it tears through the town is all Laura’s fault and she knows it and feels terrible about it. It is fascinating to see how bullying has not really changed much.)

Timeless, too, are moments such as Laura’s struggle to do the fall housecleaning and discovering how some projects always take six times as long as you think they will: “It was amazing, too, how dirty they all got, while cleaning a house that had seemed quite clean. The harder they worked, the dirtier everything became.”

Quotations I like:

“There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.”

“This earthly life is a battle,” said Ma. “If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and the more thankful for your pleasures.”

“I don’t see how anybody can be prepared for anything,” said Laura. “When you expect something, and then something else always happens.” [Ma responds:] “Even the weather has more sense in it than you seem to give it credit for. Blizzards come only in a blizzard country. You may be well prepared to teach school and still not be a schoolteacher, but if you are not prepared, it’s certain that you won’t be.”

SO TRUE.

This is also where I first read the Declaration of Independence. She quotes an awful lot of it.

Listened to this with the boys in the car and I’m glad they enjoyed it as much as me.

Sparked some good conversation as the teacher was not being fair based on some false information. This is real life stuff and we must learn to give grace.

I really enjoyed the beginning section with Mary describing the goodness of God even though she is blind.❤️

When a character from the past shows up the boys’ jaws dropped to find it was Nellie Oleson! They couldn’t believe it! The book says her nose was in the air, and one of my boys said, “Yep, that’s her alright!”

So. There is a minstrel show. Wow. That went completely over my head as a kid.

I do like this book. I'm glad Laura finally has friends! And oh dear, Nellie Oleson. This is almost a relief after The Long Winter. But it's not as good as The Long Winter. It's almost confused about how old Laura should be: young enough to go to school, old enough to teach, young enough to rock that desk, old enough to have Almanzo "see her home" -

They did grow up earlier then, I suppose, and maybe that's a piece of history, too, like that minstrel show.

Laura is growing up... at all of age fifteen. But she is still very much a child, and that is probably what makes this one of my favorite books in the series. I love how contrarian she is, willing to rock a desk so loud on Carrie's behalf that she drowns out all the other students and classes, in a defiant prairie version of the middle finger to their biased teacher. I love that she feels a little streak of mean pleasure whenever she can find some way to rub something into Nellie's face. She is not perfect, she does not pretend to be, yet she feels occasional flits of shame at her youthful jealous nature and vindictive streak. And I love her for it.

Something I failed to notice as a child, but that is more than apparent to me as an adult, is how LIW managed to grow the books right alongside Laura. It started dawning on me in The Long Winter, but I truly saw it here. In the early books, Laura had a child's perception of things -- innocent, naive, and childish. She would not remember profound statements from her parents, so they do not "make them." But by now, at age fifteen, Laura is listening to her folks. And Ma and Pa are offering far deeper nuggets of wisdom and maturity to shape her character than ever before. It's ingenious. It's a difficult thing for an author to do, because unlike the endless "serial" novels that feature eternally youthful heroines, Laura must grow up. She must wear hoop skirts. She must get her teacher's certificate to keep Mary in school. And... she gets to walk home with Almonzo Wilder.

The audience knows something Laura doesn't. That this handsome boy with the gorgeous horses who seems so much older and more mature than Laura will be her husband one day. And that... lends a beautiful sweetness to each small gesture he gives her, even the innocent ride in the buggy that Laura thought gleefully, will make Nellie SO JEALOUS.

This was my favorite book since the first two of the series, Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy. I love the sweetness of childhood in those two books, and in this book, the changes experienced during the transition of adolescence is captured so well. I was relieved that Laura became more social; living in town was clearly a net positive for her. Remembering my own high school days, I could relate to Laura’s academic burnout and her wondering what the point of anything was. This book at times reminded me of the Betsy-Tacy series, which excellently portrays the sweetness of both family and social life.