A Little Piece of Americana (Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder
Date:	04/11/00 (192 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cousin Charley's comeuppance.

Disadvantages: Wolves and bears.

Little House in the Big Woods begins ‘once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.’ Just that is enough to turn me all nostalgic and send me rushing up the stairs for the thirty year old dogeared Puffin copy which still has pride of place on the bedroom bookshelf. There reside all my favourite, most often read volumes. Really, it’s there, along with the rest in the series. Come and look if you don’t believe me. Miserable days, bored days, feeling older days, they all send me straight up to those shelves where I’m sure to find something to make me feel better.

Oops, sorry, before I find myself heading up there and forget about writing this review I’d better get back on topic. I’m sure everyone reading is aware of the television programme Little House on the Prairie starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert. I’m talking about the first in the series of books that programme was based on. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder is set in the woods of Wisconsin before the Ingalls family pushed further west to the prairie of TV fame. I must have been six or seven when I read it first and lord knows how many times I’ve gone back to it since then.

I’ll tell you what I like about that opening sentence – it’s the big ‘B’ and the big ‘W’ in Big Woods (I’m not saying capital letters, we’re talking kids books after all). I can remember clearly reading that for the very first time and immediately jumping right in to the world of a little girl living with her family in an isolated house long ago. That big ‘B’ and big ‘W’ send me straight back there even now. Magic bit of writing don’t you think? It worked for me at six and it works for me now at thirty six.

Laura lives in the log cabin with her mother and fat
her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and her younger sister Carrie, the baby. They are a ‘full day’s walk’ from the nearest town and all around them are those Big Woods. They were to become pioneers, the early settlers of the American Midwest. Frontier life had a lot more humdrum struggle than romantic adventure and this book, together with the others in the series, tells of the hard work facing the Ingalls every day but also paints a very happy picture of their family life.

The first thing we learn about Laura, apart from the ‘littleness’ of her and the ‘bigness’ of those Big Woods is how safe and secure she feels lying in her trundle bed listening to wolves howl outside because her Pa is there to protect her. With small, homely incidents like this Wilder takes children easily into a past world and makes it easy for them to imagine. She entertains us adults with them too.

Little House opens in the autumn and Ma and Pa are busily gathering food to last the winter. One of the most vivid series of scenes in the book comes here with the storing of the winter provisions, Pa hunts venison, Ma smokes it, Pa catches fish, Ma salts them, Pa and Uncle Henry butcher the pig, and Ma spends days salting and preserving, making ham. It still strikes me now how every little bit of that poor pig was made use of! It was a life where nothing went to waste and is in such direct contrast to today’s throwaway society. Pause for thought for children now perhaps.

Autumn leads to winter and Wilder goes on to describe their family Christmas, tobogganing in the snow with their cousins, making maple sugar and the sugaring-off dance at Grandpa’s. Pa takes them to town where they trade furs and go to a shop for the first time – they even buy some candy, a rare treat. Summertime brings cheese-making, and honey-gathering. Finally back to autumn and the hard work of the harvest which is allayed by &#
8216;the wonderful machine’ – a corn thresher. My favourite part is where naughty cousin Charley gets his comeuppance, I won’t tell you what that is, I’m not giving it all away in this review.

Laura is the lively one, Mary the quiet one and this leads to a certain amount of sibling rivalry. Laura longs to be good, demure and pretty like Mary, but her enquiring, spirited personality leads her into many a scrape. Ma is quiet and calm and Pa jovial. Laura and Mary are fascinated by his storytelling and love to listen to him singing and playing the violin during evenings which don’t seem to have lost much from the lack of Cartoon Network! Perhaps I should send Michael for lessons and I’ll never have to watch ‘Ed, Edd and Eddy’ or ‘Cow and Chicken’ ever again………just joking husband!

There are a whole series of ‘Little House’ books leading right up to Laura’s marriage almost twenty years later and they are all just as good. Americana in children’s fiction began with the likes of Tom Sawyer and Little Women but found worthy descendants in Wilder’s Little House books. If your children haven’t read them, and if you haven’t read them yourself I think you should.

The best children’s fiction can be read and enjoyed by adults too. We read for delight. But as adults we read with a critical mind which searches for that delight. Little House in the Big Woods captures that part of us that wants to become the child still within but as historical testament it also informs and entertains. It’s a cross between oral history, which I love, and excellent story telling for children which can’t be beaten. I think Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing for herself as well as her young audience. So forget Michael Landon and sentimental televsion – go read Little House in the Big Woods – and make your children read
it too!

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