Little Town on the Prairie, while continuing Laura Ingalls Wilder's always interesting and entertaining autobiographical story, excels at portraying a community coming to life. The few businesses in the town of De Smet, South Dakota described in the last book in the series have now become a full-blown town, with homesteading settlers coming from far and wide. A church is built, community societies are created and the school is getting too small for its students. Western culture is forged in the isolated town, a sign that its residents are prosperous enough to have free time for pleasure. (A minstrel show Pa Ingalls takes part in is cringe-worthy, to be sure, but it's faithful to what transpired.) It's also interesting to see teenagers from the 19th century so conscious of fashions, new technologies and jealousy-inducing trends.
Laura, meanwhile, is approaching adulthood, striving for a teaching certificate so as to earn money to keep her blind sister, Mary, in college. Laura's younger sisters, Carrie and Grace, also begin to come into their own, and her future husband, Almanzo Wilder, is already attempting to court her (though she doesn't seem to realize it).
This isn't the most dramatic book of the series, but a fine addition to it.
The winter of 1880–1881 is called "The Snow Winter", one of the most severe seasons in US history. A succession of blizzards from October through March of the next year kept frontier families secluded; some froze to death. The Chicago and North Western Railway stopped running trains altogether because they were stuck in mounds of snow taller than the trains themselves, leaving whole towns without food and supplies.
The Long Winter, continuing from the previous book, By the Shores of Silver Lake, has the Ingalls family moving to the newly built town, De Smet, in hopes of surviving the winter. Even proximity to other townspeople is little help in blinding, relentless storms. Laura's future husband, Almanzo Wilder, plays a larger role in this chapter, author Wilder intermittently switching the viewpoint away from Laura's narrative in mid-story for the first time in the series.
As the weather is unrelenting, so is the novel's suspense. It's not a joyful read; young readers may find this book too disturbing or depressing. As a slightly modified document of a time and place in history, though, it's fine writing.
Some children's books begin in happiness and end in tragedy. By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book series, is the opposite. The first chapter isn't finished before one tragedy is reported and another transpires (no spoilers here). I believe it may be here when my granddaughter (age seven) stopped reading the series.
Though not as strong as the previous volumes, Silver Lake captivates with the family moving to what will be De Smet, South Dakota. The building of a railroad through the territory and the commerce and small population which follows it result in a town quickly coming to life out of and in the wilderness. The long descriptions of the building of the railroad will surely try many readers' patience (they did mine); a rare miscalculation in the construction of this volume. The vivid evocation of the area, though, with its lake, wolves, myriad birds and many-textured terrain will remain with the reader. As Laura grows older, the novel also touches on union conflicts, the decimation of the buffalo population, drunken homesteaders, and Laura and a friends' first interest in the opposite sex. Appropriately, her future husband, Almanzo Wilder, makes a cameo appearance.
