First of all, let me digress and tell you about the 20/80 rule, in case you've not heard it before. When you are twenty years old, with all of your life before you, you need to give a book eighty pages before you say screw it, my life is too finite to keep eating crap. Some books are just slow starters, you know, and when you're young, you've got the time to give each story a good shot.

When you're eighty, with much less sand in the top bulb of your hourglass, you only need to get through twenty pages.

Second of all, I present to my fellow Little House fans without comment the following quotes:

"Laurie smiled. Pa was a lovable rascal."
"[Pa] fought back tears...Life was simpler then, he thought. The best years of my life were those in that tiny prairie house."
"Just want to see my half-pint...and talk bout the old days when life wasnt so dang complicated."
"Sing, girl. Sing it for your pa."

Third, I take it back. I do have a comment. This coat-tailing melodramatic excrement made me so very glad that I'm not twenty years old.

Very good story

If the book would have focused on the Little House characters instead of dragging in the chapters of "The Younguns" I would have liked it more. Those chapters seemed totally out of place, felt like fluff, and seemed to be a way of filling enough pages to have a book. I liked the dynamic between Pa and Laura. I didn't like the way the author portrayed Almanzo at all.