pantazis5's Full Review: Laura Ingalls Wilder - The First Four Years
The First Four Years is the ninth story in the Little House series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It has a very different feel to it than the other books due to the extreme sadness that is depicted throughout this book. Interesting how in Irish lore the number nine is a holy number...yet this ninth book leaves the reader with a very sad feeling.
The Little House books were my favorite stories when I was a little girl. I would read and reread these books. My books are dog eared and ripped from being used so much. Over the years I have enjoyed quiet moments when I could just pick up one of these books and reread it.
Recently I spent some time re reading The First Four Years. This story is really the final story of the Little House Books. It is very different from the first books in the series about Ma and Pa and Laura and Mary and Carrie and Grace. This book is about Laura's first four years of marriage to Almanzo Wilder.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's books are her memoirs. Written for children to enjoy. Yet the subject matter in these books should be read by adults. The Ingalls family struggled through many hardships. However, Laura's childhood struggles were only the beginning of hardships for her. The First Four Years touch the surface of the hardships that Laura and Almanzo struggled through during the early years of their marriage.
This story has been used as the basis for a couple of movies about couples living alone on the prairie. It was used in the little house on the Prairie tv shows when Almanzo and Laura were married. But it was adapted to show the couple receiving help from the town of Walnut Grove. If you read this story, you will see that while the couple stayed together, they definitely struggled alone.
Almanzo is a farmer, Laura struggled with her decision to marry this man and become a poor farmer's wife. However, she loved him and married him. The story begins with the two marrying and leaving Ma and Pa and moving into their own home. Their wedding day was nothing special. They went quietly to the minister to be married and returned to Mas to eat cake, cake by the way that Laura described as tasting very dry.
In the Little House story These Happy Golden Years Laura and Almanzo are married and the way Laura describes it in that book has much more joyful overtones than the way she describes it years later when she wrote The First Four Years .
Because Almanzo was raised as a rich farm boy in New York, one would assume that this would carry over for him into his own life, but it did not.
Their home is described so lovingly, yet the story itself is intensely sad. This couple survived many hardships in their first four years. Their home is burned to the ground, their second child dies and their crops are ruined. Almanzo gets sick and they have financial difficulties. Laura struggles with postpartum depression after the death of her son, and it is barely written about, but by the simple way in which she describes her son's death leads us to believe that the pain she felt was tremendous at that time.
Throughout the hardship and struggles, the love that these two people share for each other is obvious as they continue on. Almanzo is bound and determined to take care of his family as the man of the house, very traditional. While Laura is provided with as many comforts as he can provide. They end up with a large number of sheep to care for, very much like Almanzo had as a child in New York. (Farmer Boy book 3 of the series).
The book is written in chapters by year. Year 1,2,3 and 4. As the years progress we have to wonder how much more a couple can take! It ends at the end of the fourth year.
This couple survived, and they continued on. They struggled together and they did not divorce! This couple survived more hardship than most couples I know and they stuck it out!
This book was written by Laura just at the same time when Almanzo was passing away. Perhaps that is why she looked back on those first four years with so much sadness, and the overtones of the book are very sad. The subject matter is sad, and the writing is sad. It really is the main description of the book...Sad. This story was found among her things in three orange covered school tablets. Laura wrote the drafts of her books in the same way. This story is the story of what happened to them before the story On the Way Home which was written by Rose Wilder Lane.
This book is illustrated by Garth Williams with pen and ink drawings. The front cover shows Laura and Almanzo and baby Rose. It is very short, only 133 pages. This story will leave the reader with a terrible sense of sadness.
This story is available from Scholastic Books. It is one of the books in Laura's Litte House series that did not win any awards. It is not easy to read such sadness when the rest of the series is written with so much joy in remembering. But, it is definitely worth the read. I only wish that Laura could have written more stories when she was not overcome with grief.
Please read my other reviews of the Little House Books.
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