Brilliant Read
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These books were mainly written for a young audience. I'm a hugh Little House fan, both books and the TV series and, as a more "mature" person, I come back to the books again and again. The Long Winter chronicles the harsh cold winter when Laura was a young girl living in De Smet with her family. They endure such hardship and it is described so brilliantly by Wilder you actually can smell the snow!
It acutally makes you wish your family were as loving and close as the Ingalls family. They never seem to have a cross word. Perhaps Laura was seeing this through rose tinted glasses.
However, The Long Winter should be recommended reading for all youngsters. It would give them a taste of what life was like for playstations and DVDs.
To say that you thoroughly enjoyed a story about a town's struggle to keep alive seems a bit odd, but the way it is written you can't do anything else. It's one you will enjoy and pass on to your own children. Highly recommended. In fact, it makes you wish that the TV show had followed the books a bit more closely.
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Harsh times, Warm Family
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This is the fifth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's slightly fictionalized account of the life of pioneers in the 1860-80 period. This is an account of one of the toughest winters on record, as it was lived by a family with nothing to rely on but themselves and their neighbors. Cut off from any chance of supply, only in their first year of homesteading, they had very little in the way of food or supplies when the hard winter predicted by an ancient Native American comes to pass. There is every real chance that the tiny town on the treeless steppe of South Dakota will starve before the Hard Winter turns into spring. Only the bravery of Laura's future husband, Almanzo Wilder, and his freind Cap Garland, who go out in a break in the weather to track down a "possible" source of food, saves them from starvation. It is a truly heroic story told in a straightforward and loving fashion from the teenaged girl who survived it with her family by dent of ingenuity. One of my favorites of the series which I continue to reread as an adult on a yearly basis. Highly recommended for children 11 and up.
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