celticrockgirl's review against another edition
4.0
This was very good, and if I didn't know better I would almost think it was actually written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The author did a really good job invoking the same tone as the Little House books!
felinity's review against another edition
3.0
It was a nice "fill in the gap" book (for people who haven't read any of the many biographies about Laura), and the author tried to keep true to the original style, but it was lacking in description, character and depth - despite the subject matter - and seemed to be just trying to hit certain markers as it went along, rather than reaching them naturally. It also seemed a little short, barely covering these years.
trulybooked's review against another edition
1.0
I seem to be in the minority, but I didn't enjoy this book.
The whimsy and magic of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were in the details rather than the overall plot and this book proves it. People remember the small moments in the books like Pa making bullets or Laura twisting hay to make fuel for the fire. These small moments breathe life into each book. and they're missing here.
This book has a lot of things happen, but it doesn't feel lived like the other books do. It feels like a list of events with things filled in around them. There's very little description of the places that they live or the chores that they do. There are many instances where the characters don't feel like themselves. Maybe they're closer to their real-life counterparts, but it didn't fit the tone of the other books.
The last thing I'll say is the simplicity of the language. This book is written with a simplicity that fits closer to Little House in the Big Woods than something after On the Banks of Plum Creek. The language has a childish bent to it, but without the whimsy of the first book. Because of that, it draws attention to just how simple it is. For example:
Laura smiled. Mary had always been the best one at learning. Mary had always been the best at everything. She was kindest. She was the most patient. She minded Ma better. And she wasn't a tomboy, like Laura was sometimes.
Maybe it's because I just finished reading through the entire series, but this version stands out and not in a good way. It's not fair to expect perfection or for someone to perfectly mimic the Laura writes/Rose edits goodness of the original series, but... I loved the recent Caroline novel and I expected something new, but it's own kind of good. (But what do I know? It's got a lower overall score than this book).
The whimsy and magic of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were in the details rather than the overall plot and this book proves it. People remember the small moments in the books like Pa making bullets or Laura twisting hay to make fuel for the fire. These small moments breathe life into each book. and they're missing here.
This book has a lot of things happen, but it doesn't feel lived like the other books do. It feels like a list of events with things filled in around them. There's very little description of the places that they live or the chores that they do. There are many instances where the characters don't feel like themselves. Maybe they're closer to their real-life counterparts, but it didn't fit the tone of the other books.
The last thing I'll say is the simplicity of the language. This book is written with a simplicity that fits closer to Little House in the Big Woods than something after On the Banks of Plum Creek. The language has a childish bent to it, but without the whimsy of the first book. Because of that, it draws attention to just how simple it is. For example:
Laura smiled. Mary had always been the best one at learning. Mary had always been the best at everything. She was kindest. She was the most patient. She minded Ma better. And she wasn't a tomboy, like Laura was sometimes.
Maybe it's because I just finished reading through the entire series, but this version stands out and not in a good way. It's not fair to expect perfection or for someone to perfectly mimic the Laura writes/Rose edits goodness of the original series, but... I loved the recent Caroline novel and I expected something new, but it's own kind of good. (But what do I know? It's got a lower overall score than this book).
autumn_dannay's review against another edition
1.0
I did not like this book at all. While it does help add context to the overall story- it is much more religious than the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. It just doesn’t sit right with me at all.
andipants's review against another edition
3.0
I've read this before - just once, not the countless times I've read the original series - but our camping trip is in the process of getting rained out, so when I realized our campground was only about 8 miles from Burr Oak, you know I was going to stop by the LIW museum there, and of course I had to pick up a copy of the book and re-read.
The story follows the facts of the Ingalls family as far as they are known during the gap between the events of On The Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was a difficult and often unhappy time for the family, including more lost crops, illness, and, (likely part of the reason Laura skipped those years in the first place). The book does a good job of not shying away from difficult subjects, although at times it did seem almost emotionless - surely they would have been a little more affected by some of these events? But then again, in The Long Winter, they spend all of one page actually upset about near-starvation, so maybe that's in keeping with the original books.
The writing was not bad, by any means, but it was noticeably different than the original series. Some of this is surely due to the fact that it was written by two very different people some 70 years apart, but there were also some significant stylistic differences that felt jarring to me. For example, a lot of Pa's dialogue felt wrong - the way he regularly called each girl by pet names (in the original series, only Laura ever had pet names, which helped to emphasize that she was Pa's special helper), or when he multiple times described things as "blasted" (and Ma didn't step in to say "Language, Charles," as she aways did in the original series.
Judging the book solely on its own merits, I'd give it four stars - it's a solid piece of MG historical fiction. But it was explicitly written and marketed as a new addition to the Little House series, and on that basis, I have to bump it down to three. It just doesn't fit terribly well, writing-wise, with the original series. Cynthia Rylant is a very good author, no question, but she admits herself in the afterword that she didn't read the books until she was an adult - it seems a lifetime fan with a thorough knowledge of the books and an intuitive feel for Laura's prose style might have been a better choice for this project.
The story follows the facts of the Ingalls family as far as they are known during the gap between the events of On The Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was a difficult and often unhappy time for the family, including more lost crops, illness, and
Spoiler
the death of Laura's baby brother, FreddieThe writing was not bad, by any means, but it was noticeably different than the original series. Some of this is surely due to the fact that it was written by two very different people some 70 years apart, but there were also some significant stylistic differences that felt jarring to me. For example, a lot of Pa's dialogue felt wrong - the way he regularly called each girl by pet names (in the original series, only Laura ever had pet names, which helped to emphasize that she was Pa's special helper), or when he multiple times described things as "blasted" (and Ma didn't step in to say "Language, Charles," as she aways did in the original series.
Judging the book solely on its own merits, I'd give it four stars - it's a solid piece of MG historical fiction. But it was explicitly written and marketed as a new addition to the Little House series, and on that basis, I have to bump it down to three. It just doesn't fit terribly well, writing-wise, with the original series. Cynthia Rylant is a very good author, no question, but she admits herself in the afterword that she didn't read the books until she was an adult - it seems a lifetime fan with a thorough knowledge of the books and an intuitive feel for Laura's prose style might have been a better choice for this project.
denaa413's review against another edition
4.0
A fast read. A nice addition to the Little House books. Very good writing, I really felt like I was reading something Laura Ingalls Wilder had wrote.
jennybeastie's review against another edition
1.0
Cynthia Rylant totally missed the boat on this one. She added a super saccharine piety, in what I can only assume was an attempt to make the book seem old fashioned. Has she ever read Laura's work? She seemed to miss the honesty that's present in the real series, and the no-nonsense response to survival amidst trying and sometimes tragic circumstances. While none of the little house spin-offs can really hold a candle to the original series, this was the only book that I found truly awful.
itslorraining's review against another edition
3.0
Is it me, or is the writing style trying very hard to capture Laura's characteristically slightly stilted prose... and failing spectacularly? In the Little House books, there's a certain charm to the way Laura writes - it's stiff and formal and childlike in some ways, but it has a nice flow to it nonetheless. This is just... stiff and formal and childlike. But maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, I appreciate that someone took the time to write a book to fill the gap between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake (which was an overly long gap in which a lottttt of stuff happened, though this book actually doesn't cover as much of the space of time as I would have liked). And while it's not Laura, the writing is serviceable enough - at least it doesn't sound heinously different. There's a moment where people in the town are putting out a fire that I really liked, and that seemed very much in the spirit of the other books (though... I won't give too much away, but in that scene, the characters find something very amusing that definitely would not have been amusing if the fire had caused more damage).
Overall, I'd say this is a good one to read if you're really into anything of the time period, if you felt like the gap between Plum Creek and Silver Lake was just too long, or if you're a seriously die-hard fan of the series and want to read everything even vaguely related to it.
Overall, I'd say this is a good one to read if you're really into anything of the time period, if you felt like the gap between Plum Creek and Silver Lake was just too long, or if you're a seriously die-hard fan of the series and want to read everything even vaguely related to it.
beccah85's review against another edition
5.0
Cynthia Rylant is amazing! She took us very carefully into the missing years of the Little House years and tenderly showed us why Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn’t share these experiences in the Little House series. We laughed and cried as we read this aloud. It is a treasure not to be missed in the beloved series.
rinardkl's review against another edition
4.0
This was a very sweet book. It maintained the integrity of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and characters very well, which is a tall order to follow. Cynthia Rylant is one of my favorite modern-day authors and I am a die-hard LHOTP fan (the books, not the show-obvi) so I had high expectations for this book. My daughters and I picked it up when we traveled to De Smet, SD to check out the town from Little Town on the Prairie. It chronicles Laura's life between the books of On the Banks of Plum Creek (where she lived in MN) and On the Shores of Silver Lake (where the Ingalls family eventually settled in SD). Laura herself did not write about this time in which she and her family moved temporarily to Iowa. It was a sad time for the family, as there was the birth and death of little brother Freddie and a series of illnesses that struck the family. This goes from their home in MN to their home in IA and stops once they decide to leave Iowa. Cynthia Rylant did a great job on the research of the book, as many of the stories in there were ones that Laura herself had written about in journals and other writings. The ONLY reason for 4-stars is that the word choices, inflection, and writing style is Rylant's. Of course, this isn't a bad thing by a long shot. It's a great thing, since Rylant's words are golden. It does, however, make the reader aware that it isn't a book in the series of of LHOTP. Fans of the series and of Laura should read it. It's a joy to hear the story imagined in the hidden part of the life of Laura.