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celestemagnoliathewriter · 1 year

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Ten Books to Know Me

Thank you @indigo-scarf for the tag! It was a bit of a struggle to figure these out - all the most important texts to know me are academic/non-fiction ones, but they're too niche for an internet post. So instead, here are 10 fiction works that I found moving with a sentence from their Goodreads page.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: The story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse.

Silence by Shusaku Endo: In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey: Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by JKR: Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts has already got off to an unusual start, as the worlds of Muggle and magic start to intertwine...

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Friendship soon turns to love for Laura and Almanzo in the romantic conclusion of this Little House book and series.

The Giver by Lois Lowry: At the age of twelve, Jonas, a young boy from a seemingly utopian, futuristic world, is singled out to receive special training from The Giver, who alone holds the memories of the true joys and pain of life.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards: So begins this story that unfolds over a quarter of a century - in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that long-ago winter night.

I'll tag @merlins-sequined-hotpants, @leesielou, @in-love-with-remus-lupin, @messrmoonyy, @passionatewrites, @evesaintyves, @mumka-fanfic, @elizabethgoudge, @wisdomofwinter, @whinlatter, and @artemisia-black. Hopefully at least a couple of you haven't gotten this tag yet!

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darklingichor · 8 months

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These Happy Golden Years; The First Four Years, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

Home stretch, here we go!

These Happy Golden Years, follows Laura from 15 to 18.

In These Happy Golden Years, Laura has her first teaching job in the winter, twelve miles away from home, she's only 15 and nervous about being away from home. She will have to stay with the head of the school board, Mr. Brewer and his family.

She soon finds teaching difficult, as several of her students are taller and/or older than her.

In the evening she must contend with Brewster's wife, who is making a successful hobby out of being unpleasant.

The two month stint is seeming impossible to bear because it is too cold and too far to go home on the weekends. And then her first Friday night there, Almanzo appears with his sleigh offering to take her home.

He continues to do this, which is a great relief to Laura as it seems that Mrs. Brewer is trying her hand at being batshit. One night Laura must lie perfectly still in her curtained off corner of the claim shanty while Mrs. Brewer threatens Mr. Brewer with a knife.

Almanzo continues courting Laura even after her term ends and soon she is helping him break a pair of spirited horses on his buggy. Meanwhile, she continues to work and go back to school as a student. Soon enough Almanzo proposes and she accepts. She also accepts another term as a teacher. She is disappointed when her own school master refuses to graduate her because he wants the whole class to graduate together.

Over Christmas, Almanzo heads East to visit his family and Laura realizes that nothing feels right without him there. He shows up early admitting that he didn't want to he away from her any longer.

In the spring, Almanzo tells Laura that his mother and EJ want to throw a lavish wedding for them. Neither of them can afford that, and they don't want it anyway. To avoid the whole affair, the pair elope.

Almanzo has finished their little House on the claim he had, Laura is able see her family settled into their own claim and Mary able to graduate from the college for the blind, with help from the wages she earned.

The book ends with Laura and Manly settled and content starting their life together.

It's a very sweet book and clearly meant to be the end of the series, and it might have been, if not for a series of events that boil down to Rose being weird.

Remember back when I said that Let the Hurricane Roar really pissed off Laura? Well, it seems that she didn't know Rose was writing Hurricane, or didn't know how she was writing it. She was not happy about it, especially the weaving together her and Manly's story together with the story of her parents. So, Laura sat down and wrote The First Four Years that picks up right where Golden Years (and Pioneer Girl) stops. It was never actually meant for publication. Laura seems to have written it for herself and then left it. Even after Laura passed Rose didn't consider the manuscript ready for publication. It was a rough draft, and it completely makes sense to me that without Laura to argue, and work things through with, she didn't want to work it up for publication.

Rose was Laura and Almanzo's only daughter, Mary, Carrie, and Grace had no children, Rose had no living children.

When Laura died at 90 Rose was in her 70's. She knew she had to have someone to take over her mother's legacy (it's worth saying here, that Laura left the care of her books to The Mansfield Missouri Library. But something in how she and Rose's lawyer worded it, made it not work out that way).

Through her adult life, Rose had a habit of informally adopting boys and supporting them. After Laura passed Rose eventually adopted teenager Roger McBride as her grandson, and formally made him her heir, which put him in charge of everything Laura wrote.

He found The First Four Years in the family's things and sent it into Laura's publishers.

And so, this rough draft of a book, written and left before Farmer Boy was published, was released after both the author and editor had died.

So yeah, the tone in this one is very different.

Laura tells Almanzo that she does not want to be a farmer's wife and encourages him to work for wages in De Smet. Almanzo tells her to give him three years and if farming doesn't work, then he will do something else.

She agrees.

Crops are planted and it's looking good, on the prospect of that, Almanzo buys farm equipment.

And then

A hail storm destroys the wheat. Also Manly didn't tell her that he had debt related to the house and claim. Much like the wheat in Plum Creek, the hail destroyed crop would have paid everything off.

Laura was understandably concerned when she found out about all of this, but seemed to take a philosophical view, calling it Manly's business.

I might be reading too much into it, but to me there was a tone under that that suggested that at least part of Laura was thinking "This is on you, buddy."

At this point they own two claims, The homestead claim, which has not yet been built on and the tree claim (a piece of land where in the government made the condition that the owner had to plant so many trees and keep them alive for so many years) where Almanzo built their house.

Almanzo mortgages the Homestead claim and he and Laura must live on it. They rent the little house that Manly build for her.

While this is going on, Laura is pregnant and dealing with horrible nausea. And always one to want to be outside, the pregnancy seems to make her even more closterphobic. Rose is born in December. Amazingly, Laura goes into some detail about the birth. Throughout Pioneer Girl and the series babies just sort of appear. This makes sense considering childbirth was considered an indelicate topic in Laura's day. This, along with the decriptions of her nausea and such, I think might show that Laura never intended on having this one published.

The second year brings a pretty good wheat crop, which they have to split with their renter. This means they can only pay off some of the smaller debts.

The third year saw both Laura and Almanzo come down with Diphtheria, which left Manly physically impared for the rest of his life and unble to work both the Homestead and the tree claim, a necessity since the renter decided to leave.

So they sell the Homestead and move back to the tree claim. Laura invests in sheep, it's successful enough, but the weather, hot and dry, destroy the wheat and oat crop.

As the third year ends, they decide to try it for one more year only to have their newborn son die, the hot weather kill the crops and their house burn down. The book ends with hopefulness, but it wasn't an easy start to their lives together.

It's not all doom and gloom, Laura decribes her happiness when Rose is born, her trademark coziness is there when she writes of family time, and of riding horses with Almanzo, but she pulls fewer punches than she ever did in the series. This makes sense, she isn't looking at the farm life through the lens of a little girl anymore, not to mention, at the time of her marriage, she had spent her childhood watching her father fail over and over on count of the weather, pests, and winds of fate.

The fact is, the US. Government wanted the west settled, made it very easy to get land, but didn't make it easy to succeed. South Dakota is dry, the winters are harsh, the summers are punishing, mass cultivation makes weather patterns and insect populations change (Prarie Fires goes into fantastic detail on this and purposed solutions which were ignored at the time). You got a bunch of people trying to farm land in the same way they farmed it in the east. I don't know anything about farming, but my guess would be that that wouldn't work.

Now, that is not to say that Charles and Almanzo didn't make mistakes. They were not as cautious with money as they should have been. Spending money they didn't have yet without taking into consideration that the weather and the land doesn’t give two damns about your plans.

What is so weird is that this Almanzo bears little resemblance to the Almanzo we meet in Farmer Boy, who takes to heart the advice about money that his father gives him.

So, either Laura fixed things, or Manly fell victim to a good sales pitch, which is what I think might have happened to Charles in Plum Creek.

Both men, ecstatic that their efforts are going to pay off walk into a store and are confronted by a sales person

"My good man, I hear that you're growing a beautiful crop of wheat! "

"Charles, with that crop, you and your family shouldn't be living in a dugout out! Oh I know it hasn't been harvested yet, but when it is, you'll be set! Why don't we set up a deal. Leave the ground to the wheat, Ingalls, get your girls into a house!"

"Almanzo, it's just you and your new bride out there, isn't it? Oh you are going to be needing equipment. No, no, no, with what that crop will bring in, we can set up a deal."

Who knows?

Eventually, Laura, Almanzo and Rose moved to Missouri, and after some time had sucess with a fruit and dairy farm. Rose had sucess and a writer, and Laura, accomplished with the raising of chickens, began writing about it and other things for newspapers, which brings us back around to Laura wanting to get her childhood stories down.

Like The Long Winter, many LH fans found The First Four Years to be upsetting. Understandable considering that Laura likely never wanted this book to see the light if day.

I feel conflicted about that. Like all of the passages in Pioneer Girl marked off as not for publication, this book is a glimpse into the private thoughts of someone.

That being said, out of all the books, I like this one the best. Yes it's rough, no, it's not the safe positive world that the other books evoked, but the authentic feeling that is in all of the books is on full display here. All of the things that Caroline and Charles tried to make the best of, and tried to protect the girls from, are presented to Laura and Manly to spin and to protect Rose from.

It makes sense for a book written by a woman in her sixties to be looking back on the first four years of a life in a profession she did not want, to be stark about it. Especially if this was a silent answer to the propaganda written in Hurricane.

It makes me wonder, just how the story would have changed if she had decided to try to make it fit in with the LH books. Would she have fundged the time frame a bit and had it written from Rose's perspective? A new generation? How would she and Rose's have argued about that?

It's interesting to speculate.

Honestly this little side quest I had into this world left me with a good amout of respect for Wilder's talent. And reading Pioneer Girl really enhanced it. Caroline seems ridged in the books at times, but you understand it when you consider all the uncertainty and loss in her life. Mary is very close to Grace, this makes sense when the last thing she saw before her sight left her was her baby sister. Laura focuses on the beauty and freedom of nature, you get it when you consider just how much of her life was spent at its mercy.

Charles is jolly but impulsive, but maybe that's what you get when you put a craftsman, musician, and storyteller into a world that is telling him that the only way to do right by your family is to be a farmer.

These are the stories of a family, prettied up or told plainly, they make an impression.

Yes, they are problematic, no they shouldn't be taught to kids, but they still have value, if read critically and with alternate views available.

#Book #Books #Book Blogging 2023 #Laura Ingllas Wilder #These Happy Golden Years #The First Four Years

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