One of my favourite Little House Books.

Stories like this can make you feel grateful for not experiencing extreme hardships such as from a blizzard. Good book overall. The singing made my skin crawl though.

I've read this book many times. The most recent date is after I read it on Kindle for the first time. It's always been my favorite in the series. The reason I like it so much is that it shows how pioneers survived under extreme conditions, and how people and towns sacrificed for each other. It also describes Christmas as it should be: few gifts but lots of love and thankfulness. And the gifts they gave were given from self sacrifice and received with great appreciation. It wasn't about how much money you could spend. We have lost something in the age of technology and prosperity. This book reminds me of that.

EDIT 7/7/20: My most recent reading of The Long Winter was an audiobook. Here is my review.


This is my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book. It tells of the Ingalls struggles through a difficult winter where storms continued to hit and trains couldn’t get through. It captures the ingenuity and fortitude of the pioneers as they struggle to find food and heat their homes with blizzards raging outside and no supplies coming in.

The narration by Cherry Jones is great. What I love about this performance is when the Ingalls are singing songs, the narrator actually sings them. And when Pa is playing the fiddle, there is real fiddle music.

This is not just a beloved children’s series. It is American history, and a must read for anyone curious as to how the pioneers survived.

The Long Winter just keeps getting better every time I read it. I have no idea how many times I've read it. We aren't just lulled by the howling winds of the blizzard, but feel the dreary dullness of the monotony tied up in the weather's grip. The blizzard is a character in itself, blasting and teasing, howling and laughing, sometimes even playing.

Laura is like the town and community on the verge of growing up. She's both Ma and Pa's right-hand, doing both the farm work and work in the home. Wilder's non-fiction often spoke of the importance of the partnership between a farmer and a farm woman in keeping the farm going, and Laura breaking gender codes by helping Pa and making the hay while the sun shines becomes the perfect commentary on this-particularly at the end when Pa admits that they would never have had enough hay had she not helped.

Even after multiple reads, the tension when Almanzo and Cap Garland getting the wheat is still just as thrilling because we can feel how lost Almanzo and Cap are in the wild white haze and how cold they must be. It is interesting, too, to kind of see Almanzo's growth. (We also see more examples of Laura equating Almanzo with his Morgan horses.) I hadn't noticed it really before, but he goes from kind of the casual boy lying on the pile of hay at the beginning of the novel to a man who is willing to take action and stand by it, selfishly.

Ma, too, is definitely one of the unsung heroes of the novel, figuring out how to make the seed into flour for the wheat, watching her daughter's moods and finding ways to keep their minds and spirits sharp by having them quote passages from their reader.

The use of musical imagery is another thing that we see in all of Wilder's novels and this one is no different. Even when Pa can no longer play, it is the blizzard that has a symphony of its own and it becomes fitting that the last scene is of Pa playing and the family and the Boasts singing after a bountiful Christmas in May supper, showing that even with the darkest of winters, one knows that Spring will most certainly arrive.

For me, this is a metaphor of our own emotional winters, where we may need to go within, perhaps find nights where the darkness engulfs us, like it did Laura, and then find a moment-a lingering of light within- that tells us that the Chinook wind is coming, we just have to be patient and wait.

Another great story from the "Little House" books! Winter is coming and Pa knows it's going to be a tough one. Even though the Ingalls family doesn't like it, they have to leave their country homestead and move into town for winter. It's only for the best, because there is food, supplies, and reliable neighbors in town. As soon as spring comes the family will move back to their homestead, but it seems as though spring will never arrive.

Instead, the hard, frigid blizzards just keep coming. Sometimes they'll stop for a few hours, but then pick right back up. Laura helps as much as she can, but the house is cold and her fingers are often numb.

As winter drags on, everyone in town is low on supplies. The trains are out struck in the blizzard's ice and snow. No one knows if they have enough food to last until the trains get through. The only thing that the town can think about is the constant howling of the wind, drumming noises on the roof, and the frost-covered window pane.

My personal thoughts: Truly enjoyable book. It's filled with good morals of family and friends working together, and creating happiness in a world of darkness. Especially great to read on a dark wintry night.

#lerlauraingallswilder

I re-read this one at least a couple of times over the decades. It was intense. Probably the best of the lot - had plenty of socio-political commentary, too.
(See discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...)
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Reread again. Comments stand. Absolutely wonderful, provocative, memorable book, very highly recommended.

What a brutal winter they survive in this book. So encouraging to see how Ma & Pa lead their family and the sacrificial love that Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland show for their neighbors.

What an infuriating book! The Ingalls family have to keep burning bits of hay and potatoes to keep them warm and every 2 chapters it cuts to the Wilders eating huge plates of pancakes and bacon in their house and then when Pa comes they offer him food and he never tells his shrivelled family that he just got to eat a side of ham and three thousand pancakes and they had to eat animal-feed sourdough and half a root. The Wilders are so fucking smug I hope they die of scurvy, but Charles "Pa" Ingalls is still the true villain of the little house series. If he hadn't been clinging to his crap Thoreau fantasy and flipping out whenever there was more than 10.5 people in a 100 km radius the Ingallses could have just stayed in Wisconsin where they had a farm that was going pretty well, and the help of family and friends, but no, Pa's agoraphobia (?) meant he needlessly dragged his family to land they didn't own, then back to Wisconsin, then to other land they didn't own, then to Wisconsin again, then to a locust-plagued place, and then to the middle of a prairie where they basically had to live in a giant wind-tunnel chest freezer for seven months. None of this had to happen! Fuck you Pa.

Loved listening to the audiobook with my ten-year-old. Loved this series at this age, and it was stunning to reread what they endured that winter.

Family audiobook for January. A great family experience—with good discussions about things that are troubling in regards to racism.

“Then the sun peeped over the edge of the prairie and the whole world glittered. Every tiniest thing glittered rosy toward the sun and pale blue toward the sky, and all along every blade of grass ran rainbow sparkles.”

This is the most grueling book of the series, so in some ways it's the most memorable for me. I remember once trying to twist up some lawn clippings to try my own version of the dreaded hay sticks, but it was not a success. I know that some details in this book are embellished (the frequency of blizzards) or made up (the warning from the native elder) for the sake of the story, but overall it's still a harrowing account of a pretty terrible winter.

A good book to keep in mind during the mild inconvenience of waiting for my windshield to defrost.

This is also the first book where we get real time with Almanzo Wilder as an adult. Even though Laura is only 14 during this account, she's writing this story in hindsight so naturally there's a certain admiring tone to her descriptions of Almanzo....or at least to his horses. Honestly, it seems clear that she likely had a crush on Cap Garland, since his smile was described in nearly as much detail as those Morgan horses....