Sulle rive del Plum Creek

I think I am getting into these now. Maybe it is because Laura is older and so has more detailed memories to draw on? Or maybe it is because they were somewhere with more other people to interact with? Or perhaps it is just that I am more numbed to prairie life than I was at the start, and instead of hitting ‘this is terrible’ I just hit ‘oh yes, another disaster that almost kills them all and leaves them destitute, but Laura has a nice fur muff.’

Pa continues to be infuriating. He is so full of love and charm and cleverness, singing and playing his fiddle, crafting things for the farm out of nothing. But really! ‘Yes, I will give you my entire farm for that wagon and two ponies’ ‘yay, great!’? It was foreshadowed very heavily by the author (‘yes, of course we can buy an entire new house on credit, living in a dugout is tedious, and we’ll be rich come the wheat harvest!’), but even without that it would hardly have been a great surprise that they are living somewhere where farming is Just A Bit Doomed. Ah, Pa.

They are nearer a town now, so we see Laura and Mary going to church and school. It was interesting to realise that even their contemporary Americans thought they were living a hard and miserable life - the town gets sent the equivalent of Christmas shoeboxes, by missionaries, for the ‘poor people’.

Laura is a bit less angelic with a bit more personality in this one. In fact, to my modern ears ‘this child is slightly greedy and snobbish, so it’s ok to trick her into getting covered in leeches’ is a bit awful!

I think this is the first time I’ve been keen to get to the next one. ( )

It is so funny and happy! it is so real life. one thing that is why i gave it four stars is cause they are never sad just laura when she is sad. ( )

Lots of details on life in the Minnesota country a hundred years ago. The family had a hard time farming due to grasshopper plague. And when grasshoppers aren't there, summer is hot and winter is severe with blizzards. The family stayed loving and committed to each other. And you get the sense that a family that stays together is more important than all material riches that they may gain. ( )

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 ( )