On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)

This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.

Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs.

Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much as a by your leave.

Another bit that stamps itself in memory is the prairie fire that brings the “wheels of fire”, or burning tumbleweeds, that also beset the Ingalls home.

“On the Banks of Plum Creek” recounts hardships like the fires in “Little House On the Prairie” and the blizzards in “The Long Winter”, but it’s funnier than those books. This is never more so than when Pa comes out of his den within shouting distance of the house; also when the girls bring in too much firewood; and when Laura, having attended church, stops feeling wickedness for Nellie Oleson and feels merely a “little bit of mean gladness”.

The book also has the child-eye perspective that is so prominent in “Little House On Big Woods”. But in that book Laura saw things that, though they were brand new to her, she could at least name, like a lake, or a town. In this book she’s constantly seeing things she has no name for, as when she first sees a belfry (“a tiny room with no walls and nothing in it”), or a rug carpet (the “whole floor was covered with some kind of heavy cloth that felt rough under Laura’s bare feet”).

And a blackboard, chalk and eraser: "On the wall behind Teacher’s desk there was a smooth space of boards painted black. Under it was a little trough. Some kind of short, white sticks lay in the trough, and a block of wood with a woolly bit of sheepskin pulled tightly around it and nailed down. Laura wondered what those things were."

All of this would have been ruined if the adult author, leaving the child’s perspective, had named these things before Laura could work them out herself.

The book is constantly playing like this with perspective. We are never told what something is until we’re shown what it looked like to Laura – whether it’s the leeches that she finds on her legs after taking a swim, or the burning, spinning tumbleweeds, or that visiting swarm of locusts: "The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm."

I read the last 170 pages of this book in one day, and I’m a slow reader.

One of the most enjoyable, and startling, reads I can remember.

This book has a few unique stamps on it, and I could have dubbed it The One With Walnut Grove; or The One With the Hobbit Hole; or The One Where Pa Hibernates Like a Bear.

But nothing beats those grasshoppers. ( )

3.5 stars ( )

The characters from the TV show "Little House on the Prairie" start to show up in this book. The Ingalls have moved to Minnesota and are living in a sod house, that is, a house carved into the hillside beside Plum Creek. Pa begins to build a two-story house with prepared materials (unlike the little house in the big wood or the little house on the prairie in which all the wood and material he used he chopped down and carved himself). The only problem is he bought it all on credit, expecting a big harvest. Then the locusts came... (Watch the movie "Days of Heaven" to see what that is like)

The older girls, Mary and Laura, begin going to town for school and dealing with the spoiled, bratty Nellie Oleson, whose father owns the store. We begin to see Laura's personality bloom into someone who is not just a sweet, obedient child. She has a temper, can become annoyed, envious, even disobedient.

The forces of nature play a huge part in this book and gives the modern reader an idea of just how precarious life was back then. ( )

The beauty of Laura is her absolute normality. Who hasn't delighted to know that everyone has their own "Nellie?" ( )

My older boy loves these books and wants to read them every night, while the younger one listens in sometimes, but would really rather read something else. I love the history and geography that is being learned. ( )