Imma be real - sometime about February of this story it gets real hard to slog through. Still love the books, but man this one hits them when they’re down.

I can understand both sides of the debate on whether Little House books are appropriate for school children. On the one hand, the characters generally hate Native Americans and enjoy Minstrel shows. On the other hand, the books are a firsthand account of what the frontier or “zone of contact” between settlers and indigenous people actually looked like. To be sure, there’s plenty of romantic nostalgia here. But there’s more honesty in these books than you may remember. Beyond these issues, Laura Ingalls Wilder tells her vivid tales from a fascinating point of view that is somehow both childish and mature. There is also a strangely Zen or psychedelic feel to these books. The heroine often pauses to listen to the sounds of the prairie, to feel the cold that envelops her, to look up to admire the stars above her. She lives in the moment in a Doors of Perception kind of way. I read the audiobooks, which add a beautifully musical dimension to the experience of “Isness.”

This one is probably one of bleaker entries in the Little House series, but I still love it for much of the same reasons as I enjoy the whole series -- the picture it gives us of the pioneers who settled this land of ours. I love seeing the good and the bad times they went through. The Long Winter was definitely one of the hardest times they faced. It was a perfect picture of how hard homesteading could be but also a picture of how life in many small towns were in that the people came together to face hard times. Another gem in this wonderful series.

Laura Ingalls Wilder books never disappoint, but I found this one different and interesting. The Wilders are now living in Cheyenne Wyoming as the town is just beginning to develop. Charles Ingalls keeps sensing that winter is not going to be normal as the animals are leaving the area much earlier than usual. Little does he know that this particular winter will be one that will last from October through April with blizzards never seen before. How will the family manage to make it through one of the roughest winters in Wyoming history?

This book gives just a taste of what living through continuous blizzards is like and how the Ingall family struggled to stay alive both physically, mentally, and spiritually. Plagued by starvation, frostbite, and loneliness, both Pa and Ma kept the family alive with creative thinking, a small amount of food, and music.

It was fitting that I read "The Long Winter" while visiting family in Minnesota. It was bitterly cold, the streets were packed with snow and the wind chill was below zero. As I read, I could hear the wind howling outside, and the harsh winter of 1880-81 didn't seem like that long ago.

Book six in the Little House series tells how the Ingalls family survived numerous blizzards while homesteading near De Smet, South Dakota. Pa first sensed that the season would be severe when he was harvesting hay and he saw the thick mud walls of a muskrat house.

Pa was shaking his head. "We're going to have a hard winter," he said, not liking the prospect.

"Why, how do you know?" Laura asked in surprise.

"The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses," Pa told her. "I never saw a heavier-built muskrats' house than that one."

A few weeks later, a wise old Indian stopped by the town's store to warn the white folks about winter. He said there would be heavy snow and strong winds for seven months. Indeed, that winter brought many long blizzards, and with each one, the town's supplies went down. All of the animals had fled the area, so hunting was scarce, and the snow was so deep that the train couldn't get through to deliver food or coal.

(While reading this, I remembered that the closest thing we currently have to scarcity in winter is when the local store runs out of bread and milk for a day because of a panic over snow.)

Like the others in the series, this book has good reminders about just how hard homesteading was. Pa and the other pioneers worked long hours to get the fields ready for crops, and they had to build everything from scratch. When the family ran out of coal to burn for heat, Pa figured out a way to twist hay into sticks, so they could burn that. When they ran out of kerosene, Ma figured out how to make a "button candle" using axle grease.

"We didn't lack for light when I was a girl, before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of."

"That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves — they're good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em."

And when there wasn't any wheat or flour left in town, well, luckily Almanzo Wilder had the courage to go and try to find some more.

Any Little House fans reading this will perk up at the name of Almanzo, because that is who Laura will eventually marry. This book is the first one where Laura seems to notice him, which was sweet.

I think the purpose of this book was to show how dangerous those prairie winters were. Neighbors had to work together and help each other to survive. In the modern, self-involved age we live in, this story was a reminder of how a small town used to be.

4 stars

This book is a great adventure! Though I didn’t appreciate a few word choices, the story was great and interesting and kept me hooked. This was a staple of my childhood, and it was great fun to revisit it now that I’m grown.

We live in troubled times. There is civil unrest and prejudice and unwarranted hatred plaguing our world, across borders and oceans and digital platforms. It’s easy to wish we could go back to simpler times, to an era where a man’s word was good and pollution was decades into the future.

But I have to tell you: nothing and nobody and not any amount of money could convince me to travel back in time to trade lives with Laura Ingalls Wilder.. Nope. I love, no, I adore Little House on the Prairie. The television series from the 70s has been my happy place all summer. But as the series progresses and as I’ve gotten farther into the books, I’ve come to see the dark side of prairie life. Yes, this was a time before technology made our world smaller and gave us the anonymity to attack those who disagree with us with no concern about the consequences. It was a time when neighbors helped each other, and when man had room to breathe without the crowding that is so common today.

But it was also a time of extreme hardship. If you found yourself facing a longer, harder winter than you anticipated, you could very possibly starve to death or freeze to death. If a train couldn’t get through with supplies, or if your crop hadn’t done as well as you hoped during the summer months, you could watch helplessly as your food and fuel stores dwindled down to nothing. Can you imagine watching your children starve and knowing there was nothing you could do? We live in a world where food can be delivered to our doorstep, where aid is much more easily attained for those who need financial assistance, where school lunches are provided for kids whose parents can’t afford them.

We live in a land of plenty. Even though that same truth doesn’t stretch across the globe, there are people working on ensuring that no one, no matter where they live or how little they have, won’t have to go hungry. We have so much to be thankful for, and yet often we are so focused on the negatives that we forget to count our blessings. After reading this book, I’m thankful for so many things. I’m thankful for a well insulated house and a reliable furnace, and for a fire place and an unlimited amount of firewood should the power fail. I’m thankful for stocked cabinets and a full refrigerator and a freezer full of meat. I’m thankful for nonperishable food, for processed foods in cans and boxes and bags, even if I hope the day never comes when they’re all we have to eat. I’m thankful for my car and for paved roads. I’m thankful for grocery stores. I’m thankful that I will never have to endure the kind of winter that Laura and her family had to endure, and that starvation is incredibly unlikely unless I’m lost far away from home.

Honestly, I’m just thankful.

I honestly don't know how anyone managed to survive back then. There were blizzards for SEVEN MONTHS, and since no trains could get through they literally had to survive on bread and potatoes for almost all that time. It just really sounds like they should not have survived.

I really liked getting Almanzo's perspective for some parts, and I think it would have been really nice to have gotten another whole book from his perspective when he was a teenager. Like how he decided to come west, his and Royal's travels, and stuff like that. I would definitely have read that!

This book was really good, just like all the others, and I can't wait to start the next one!

What a wonderful stroll down memory lane. Growing up this was a avarice series of mine, and now reading it decades later as an adult my appreciation has only grown, for both the story and messages, as well as the wonderful resilient Ingalls family.

The title speaks volumes. At the start, Pa Ingalls thinks he's prepared for once in his life. He's had a history of being knocked down by sudden disasters such as prairie fires, grasshopper plagues and Indian rampages. This time he's decided to heed four warning signs that the coming winter will hit hard.

1) Muskrats are building the walls of their homes super thick.
2) Birds are flying south as fast as they can.
3) A couple of freak early blizzards have struck in October.
4) An elderly Indian man warns several fellows that a 'heap big snow' is in store for them.

Together, the four signs convince Pa to move his family from the new claim back to town, to weather the cold season. Living in a tight community with shops and a railway handy will guarantee a steady supply of provisions, right? Nope, not so simple, because the sheer magnitude of that harsh winter takes almost all the new settlers in town off guard. It turns out Pa's almost knocked out again, and Ma and the girls with him, as usual.

The blizzards are like vicious adversaries. They strike suddenly, last for days, obliterate everything in sight, and plunge temperatures far below zero degrees. They also occur back-to-back so often, there's barely time to draw a breath between them. Shops run out of groceries because trains can't make it through. No sooner is snow cleared from the tracks than there's a mountain of more. Several months straight of this push the Ingalls' and several others to the brink of starvation.

You can't help cheering them on when they improvise their own alternative sources of heat and light. There's no more coal, so Pa invents a method of twisting hay to use for fuel. The kerosene is through, so Ma makes a button lamp with the help of some axle grease and a strip of calico. Three cheers for team Ingalls, but unfortunately the blizzards have the upper hand when it comes to food, which is far harder to improvise.

Not everyone in town is equally disadvantaged. The Wilder brothers are confident their supplies will see them through, and hot pancakes with molasses and bacon become their staple. Sure, it might be a bit monotonous, but I can imagine my own boys being happy with delicious pancake stacks day after day, so I'm sure those two didn't mind at all. Almanzo even hides a stash of wheat which he intends to use for seed in the spring. But as winter wears on, he can't help sensing that some people won't make it unless someone does something drastic. There are rumours of a settler with an abundant wheat crop living miles out of town, so some daredevil will have to dash out between blizzards to find him and attempt to purchase some. Only then will it become life-saving wheat. Who better to take the risk than two fit young men like Almanzo and his friend, Cap Garland?

It's quite intriguing to see snippets of townsfolk who really lived. There's Mr Foster, who seems to bungle everything he touches, and the opportunist Mr Loftus, who intends to rip off starving people for all he can get. Then there's Mr Anderson, the settler who grew all that wheat. I hope he enjoyed his own company. And surely there were several people who weren't even mentioned. Cap Garland's family included his sister Florence, the school teacher, but did they have a mother? Did Mrs Garland attempt to stop Cap setting off on a rescue mission which might have cost him his life? Women like Ma wouldn't let their husbands go, so surely it'd hurt even more to let your teenage schoolboy son take the risk? I'm curious about this boy with the smile like the sun coming up at dawn, that changed everything. (Those are Laura's own words, which make it easy to wonder if she ever had a crush on him.)

The horses deserve a mention as some of the best characters too. Laura was good at writing animals, and they stand out with personalities of their own. First was Almanzo's fancy matched team. Prince went on the dangerous mission with him and Lady ran off with an antelope herd for a short time. She was adorable when she caught sight of Prince and Almanzo in the distance, and raced back to them. Then there was the Ingalls' horse, good old David, who Pa called more sensible than he believed a horse could possibly be. They all just happened to be caught in that terrible deadly winter, but did the best they could, and their humans would surely be nowhere without them. They deserve the mention as brave, unsung heroes. Of course there was also Sam the panicker, but hey, I can't blame him for freaking out. It takes all sorts.

There are always some cool lines in these stories, often from Pa, who is one of the best at one-liners. 'I beat the blizzard to the stable by the width of a gnat's eyebrow,' he says. And when Laura suggests he quit sugar to bring out the full flavor of his tea, he replies, 'A good, hot cup of tea brings out the flavor of the sugar, Half-Pint.' It made me laugh when he told Grace his nose was frozen, and Ma said, 'Stop worrying about your looks, Charles.'

The books in this series are all excellent, but this one has a sense of urgency and desperation all of its own. The stakes are so high, it reads like page-turning fiction, but all that happened was true. How amazing for 21st century readers like us to reflect that these people with no electricity in their homes sat through what was essentially a 7-month black-out in sub-freezing temperatures. Although there wasn't much natural light in the story, it throws heaps of light on the way some people were forced to live, and I love it. It's well worth a read, and as winter has set in here where I live, it was a good atmosphere to enjoy it.

It's been nearly 15 years since I last read this aloud to one of my daughters, but I remembered a great deal of it (reading a book aloud three times to my kids tends to ingrain it in my memory fairly well most of the time). This book is a bit challenging to go through in moments. First of all, that winter goes on and on and on and things become very difficult as the family is starving as are most of the people in the town. There is that one scene also were we are reminded, by the author's honestly, that her mother was racist, so I'll get that up front and out of the way--she could have ignored that and just hidden it. But once again her father takes people at face value, and whether or not he says it in a way that makes us comfortable in the 21st century, for the 1870s it was considered fair to take each man or woman for who they are and to not judge an entire race by only some members of it.

Overall, it is still a valuable classic, and that scene makes a fine teachable moment for a child.

This book (with its siblings) is the bedrock of my reading life. I haven't revisited it for a few years; our 2017 Oregon winter made me eager to see, again, how the Ingalls made it through all those blizzards.

I started reading the print book, but the audiobook jumped into my hands when I visited the children's audiobook section in our public library. At first I was put off by the reader's voice: raspy and low, like the gravelly tones of a lifetime smoker. But her huskiness made Pa's voice so convincing that I ended up preferring it. I'm so glad that she sang all the songs. There are snippets of fiddle music, too...

Each reading reminds me to be grateful for what I have and never to complain. I admire how diligently Ma and Pa work to maintain good spirits. And sort of rejoice the one time Ma loses it. How wise the parents were to hold some good things back in order to have surprises later.

And, again, how much kids desire to help and contribute: Laura's help with the haying, Mary's grinding wheat in a hand-held coffee grinder, all but the baby twisting hay into 'sticks' for heat.

I have always considered Scotland my adopted homeland. That love for all things Scottish, it just occurred to me, probably started with Charles and Caroline Ingalls and the several references to Scottish glory and ingenuity.

I'm eager now to revisit the series in their audio form.