I'd read it back in about 5th grade, but decided to revisit it. That made me think about this book for some reason. So, I started thinking about being confined to a house for endless hours in the winter, with snow outside. Then, we had a blizzard, and I continued to be confined to the house. I was pretty much shut in for a couple of weeks after I was moved home. I had an accident at Christmas and ended in the hospital for a week. * I tried to translate that from fahrenheit to celsius, to get a feel for how terrible it was, but actually, it's the cross over point, it's minus forty in both scales. This is a winter that leaves them gaunt and pinched and unable to think, a winter where even in the first blizzard they are nearly all frozen to death just trying to walk home from school. Smiling children with ruddy cheeks throw snowballs at each other and sledge down a hill. It feels like someone was told 'there is a little house book called the Long Winter, can you draw a cover?' and never actually read the book. I can't not comment on the cover of this book. And Almanzo definitely saves the day by going out through the blizzard to the settler and buying his grain for the town - but the settler is hording his grain for exactly the same reason Almanzo is, and Almanzo is happy to take the risk and the heroics, but not happy to just feed the whole town from his future and his best seed grain.
We know Laura and Almanzo are going to end up together, but I hadn't realised until this one how attractive actually having food - pancakes and salt pork! - can be in a man when all you have is raw wheat. And somehow they hold on until April and the trains come through again. They do what they can to keep their spirits up, reciting famous speeches and singing hymns.
Almanzo makes a heroic ride through the blizzards with Cap to get more grain for the town. Pa finds Almanzo's hidden grain and saves them from starving. We even see Ma and Pa snap at each other for once.īut there are glimmers of hope in it all. Everyone is slowly starving to death, and their life has shrunk to a tiny circle around the stove, and they are tired and depressed. It is a book of literally months of twisting hay into ropes to burn it, and grinding grain painfully slowly by hand in a coffee mill. The trains stop running as the cuttings fill with snow, and so they all know there is not enough food or coal to survive the winter, and they slowly eke out what they have. Constant blizzards, temperatures of minus forty*. Book 6 in the Little House series is a horrifically grim story of six months of the family surviving a terrible winter.
0 kommentar(er)
