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shellyhartner 's review for:
The Long Winter
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
I reread this one with my boys, who are 10 and 8. The last time I read it, I was probably about the same age as my older son. It was one of my favorite little house books back then. As a child of the Cold War, I was always pretty sure that I'd one day find myself living with my family in a nuclear fallout shelter of a basement, and I spent considerable amounts of time and mental effort trying to figure out how we would survive. Laura's story was my real-life, 19th century version of a model. I found comfort in the family's ability to make it through the never-ending winter, even without light, without heat, without food.
Now, as a middle-aged woman who is living in a world with no Soviet Union and is fairly certain she won't ever have to wait out a nuclear winter in her basement (and further understands how unrealistic the idea was in the first place), I was more taken in by Pa's character, which seemed so different than the Pa I knew and loved from the other Little House books. This Pa was a bit raw and brazen. Starvation will do that to a person, I suppose, but Pa forcibly takes wheat from Almanzo, steals food off of a train, leads a mob into a store that is price gouging, and goes on a crazy rant one night in the cabin. This is a different Pa from the principled, idealized, practially-perfect-in-every-way one in the Little House stories, and I suspect he's a little closer to the real Pa. He's a kind man, yes, but tough and not afraid to lose some of his principals when it is the only way to keep his family alive.
My own grandfather grew up in a family of settlers. It took a certain amount of stinginess (more kindly-termed 'frugality') and selfishness for the families who made it as settlers. Now, granted, by most measures Pa Ingalls was not the most successful settler out there, and maybe that was because he was in fact more altruistic or principled than your average pioneer, but still this more nuanced version of Pa and of the family, with their occasional spats after living in one room together for months on end, feels closer to life.
Now, as a middle-aged woman who is living in a world with no Soviet Union and is fairly certain she won't ever have to wait out a nuclear winter in her basement (and further understands how unrealistic the idea was in the first place), I was more taken in by Pa's character, which seemed so different than the Pa I knew and loved from the other Little House books. This Pa was a bit raw and brazen. Starvation will do that to a person, I suppose, but Pa forcibly takes wheat from Almanzo, steals food off of a train, leads a mob into a store that is price gouging, and goes on a crazy rant one night in the cabin. This is a different Pa from the principled, idealized, practially-perfect-in-every-way one in the Little House stories, and I suspect he's a little closer to the real Pa. He's a kind man, yes, but tough and not afraid to lose some of his principals when it is the only way to keep his family alive.
My own grandfather grew up in a family of settlers. It took a certain amount of stinginess (more kindly-termed 'frugality') and selfishness for the families who made it as settlers. Now, granted, by most measures Pa Ingalls was not the most successful settler out there, and maybe that was because he was in fact more altruistic or principled than your average pioneer, but still this more nuanced version of Pa and of the family, with their occasional spats after living in one room together for months on end, feels closer to life.