Book Review: The Long Winter

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: The Long Winter


Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Date: 1940

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-440006-9

Length: 334 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Garth Williams

Quote: "Every seventh winter was a hard winter...at the end of three times seven years came the hardest winter of all."

After a full-scale blizzard in October, the residents of De Smet, South Dakota, were willing to listen to the old man who delivered this warning. Charles Ingalls and his family moved into their house in what would eventually become Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie. Royal Wilder and his sassy little brother Almanzo moved from their homestead into their feed store in town.

Because the "Little House on the Prairie" TV series was shot in California, those who watched the TV show missed the most exciting episode of Laura's and Almanzo's teen romance. In real life, Ma and Pa Ingalls moved to Missouri after Laura and Almanzo were married; they had six children, not four, and some incidents that occur only in the TV show may be based on family stories from the Missouri years. In real life, however, Mary and Laura Ingalls grew up in South Dakota, and Laura fell in love with Almanzo because of an adventure that could only have happened in a climate that couldn't be easily simulated in California.

That episode is described in this book. Homesteaders who relied on trains to deliver food and fuel barely survived when the trains were unable to run. The Wilder brothers didn't want to let everyone grind up their special seed wheat for bread, but neither could they let the neighbors starve. Before the winter was over Almanzo, who was only nineteen but pretending to be old enough to have a homestead, faced yet another blizzard to bring the seed wheat into town and feed the community. The real Almanzo Wilder didn't look like a TV star and developed permanent disabilities after a fever in The First Four Years after he and Laura were married, but at nineteen he had been a hero.

Laura was only thirteen that winter, but her adventures in The Long Winter are more exciting than the stories reenacted to fill in that part of her life on the TV show. Cattle's heads froze into the snow as they grazed. A small auk visited the Ingalls home. Horses sank into snowdrifts. Children twisted hay to burn for emergency heat when the wood and coal were gone. Everyone took turns grinding wheat in a coffee grinder so they could have extremely coarse wheat bread. We know that Laura and Almanzo will survive because there are more books in the series, but up to the end of the book it's hard to imagine how.

To be fair, a certain amount of falsification did go into the writing of these books. Was it really the very last of the seed wheat that was ground up on the day...but never mind. In some ways the TV show was truer to life, since it used material that was omitted from the books due to privacy considerations. One example: Laura Ingalls Wilder chose to mention only three sisters in the books, but the TV show brought in all six children.

Is it realistic to expect children to read 334 pages? I think so. The story is told simply, in short chapters, with large clear type and lots of pictures, and each chapter is a page-turner. Ever since the Little House books were first printed, children have loved reenacting these adventures, and The Long Winter is especially rich in scenes to reenact when they have to stay inside in bad weather.

If you have not already read this book, you might enjoy reading it for yourself. If you buy it for a child, you may also want to buy a hand-cranked grinder and some rags for braiding into rugs.

To buy it from me, click here.