pantazis5's Full Review: Laura Ingalls Wilder - These Happy Golden Years
Laura Ingalls Wilder is a well known children's author. Her stories of her life have been enjoyed for so many years and will continue to be enjoyed for years to come. Her stories tell of the adventures of the Ingalls family. Laura Ingalls is second the daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. The Ingalls family travels by wagon across open lands to find the place where they will finally be happy.
In These Happy Golden Years there is no more family travel. The Ingalls family seems to have found their home. Charles Ingalls adds on to the family homestead and they are settled in. Laura does the traveling on her own when she works as a school teacher away from home. This is tough for her. Being away from Pa and Ma and her sisters is strange and she is working as a teacher and living with evil people who have no respect for themselves or her and really do not want her there. She suffers through the job, and the best part of the job is that Almanzo comes to pick her up on weekends and drives her home to Pa and Ma.
Laura Ingalls teaches school, and when it finally ends she comes home to DeSmet and is back with Pa and Ma. But it seems like a very short time that she is home again. Almanzo comes a courtin' and she is off to singing school, and sleigh rides. She helps a family friend by staying at her claim with her, again she is away from home and her blind sister Mary comes home from Blind School and Laura only gets a short time with her. Laura teaches another school and then takes a job in town sewing to purchase a new brown poplin dress and poke bonnet.
She learns to drive a buggy with a wild pony that needs training and she is happy. Almanzo proposed to her and she says yes! With sayng yes, she gives up teaching. History tells us that married women were not allowed to be teachers in those days of American Life. Ma and Laura work to make new clothes for her wedding. Laura and Almanzo finally go off alone to be married, without any fanfare. Almanzo's sister wants a big wedding, and Laura knows her parents cannot afford such a luxury. They opt for a simple wedding and one of Ma's simple cakes and dinner with the family.
Laura and Almanzo go to their own home. Almanzo has made it comfortable and friendly for her. They are happy and she describes her new home with tenderness and joy, but in the last sentence of the book as she tells about her father's fiddle there is an air of lonesomeness. She will surely have homesickness. Her mother knew she would have some homesick feelings and she told Almanzo to put Laura's things around the house to help her feel comfortable when she entered her new home.
This book was written in 1943 by Laura Ingalls. What a wonderful treasure she has given as she wrote about her life as a teenager and then a young adult getting married.
The title of the book These Happy Golden Years lead us to believe that this is quite possibly Laura Ingalls happiest time in her life. When next we read her description of her home in the very next book we will find a different attitude as she describes it from married eyes and not the eyes of a young woman about to be married.
I highly recommend the Little House series. Read them in order though, because if you read this one first rather than 8th it will be hard to follow the characters.
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