For my full review: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2...From the opening pages, it feels as though we are on familiar territory – Wilder’s prose is so very distinctive in its apparent simplicity and clarity, vividly conjuring up this bygone era when America was a nation newly-forged. We watch young Almanzo walking to school with his sisters and brother, while ‘the cold nipped Almanzo’s eyelids and numbed his nose’ – the setting and characters may have changed but Laura Ingalls Wilder as a narrator is familiar. I could not help but think what a very lovely gift it was though, that Laura conjured on the page the boy who would one day be her husband. Certain characters and stories were familiar from the other Little House books, anecdotes which I had already witnessed the adult Almanzo telling on to Laura – one imagines their conversation continuing over the course of their long marriage, of their discussions as Laura sat down to write Almanzo’s life. It is a true act of love.Young Almanzo begins the story aged nine, the youngest Wilder child with elder siblings Eliza-Jane, Royal and Alice. The reader recognises the haughty Eliza-Jane as the woman who grows up to become the schoolteacher Miss Wilder, Laura’s future nemesis. Her childhood bossiness make her an apparent antagonist here too, but her timely assistance to get Almanzo out of a scrape feels more conciliatory, as does the fact that Laura skips over the incident which inspired her teenage self to compose a poem with the punchline ‘Lazy, Lousy, Lizy-Jane’. As the youngest child, Almanzo is the one still in moccasins because his feet grow too fast for boots, he is the one who has to carry the lunch pail to school, he is too young to help with the colts and he is left behind when all his elder siblings begin at the Academy in Malone. Almanzo’s childhood trials are not the same as Laura’s, but his wife writes with affectionate understanding – he may not have Indians coming to the door demanding food, there may not be wolves outside at night and his father never does get lost in a blizzard, but his worries and concerns are taken seriously, as are his triumphs.An early drama comes from the ‘big boys’ from the rough Hardscrabble settlement who plan to beat the new teacher and break up the school. Almanzo frets over what will become of nice Mr Corse who is too little to beat even one of them, let alone all five. While this may seem like a situation with the potential for comedy, Laura deploys with her trademark detachment one of those instances of understated horror as Almanzo overhears his father and Mr Corse discussing the previous teacher Jonas Lane who had later died of the injuries inflicted by the Hardscrabble boys. Mr Corse remarks simply, ‘”Jonas Lane and I went to school together. He was my friend.” Father did not say any more.‘ Laura’s minimalist approach to writing makes the impact of these stories all the more lasting. I still remember her sparse description of what befell two young brothers caught in a hurricane and perhaps more painfully, her bland retelling of the time long-term family friends Mr and Mrs Boast attempted to buy Laura and Almanzo’s baby. For Laura, there is no need to pass judgment or tell the reader her own opinion and in refusing to do so, it takes her writing to a whole new level – reading the Little House series sparked so many discussions between myself and my mother as we ourselves were called upon to come up with a response because Laura herself refuses to do so.I had wondered why Laura never wrote a continuation of her husband’s childhood – was there perhaps no interest in the life of a boy growing up on a successful farm? Certainly, Almanzo’s childhood is far more secure than that of Laura – a steady home, a sprawling farm, a comfortable family – these contrast starkly to Laura’s nomadic upbringing living in a variety of homes whose only unifying feature was the fact that they were small. Add that to the death of her younger brother and her elder sister going blind and the family’s constant struggle to feed itself and pull themselves above the poverty line and Farmer Boy begins to sound idyllic. However, like Laura, Almanzo had his own duties to perform and responsibilities to shoulder and Farmer Boy tracks a year in his life and we watch as the young boy’s zeal for livestock begins to catch fire. Given that Laura declared to Almanzo before they were married that she did not wish to be a farmer’s wife because the life was too hard, it feels like a relief to read her respect for the trade. A mere few days at the Academy are enough to convince his elder brother Royal that he wants to be a storekeeper so that he no longer has to work every minute on the land but the reader can sense Almanzo’s silent disagreement as his fascination with livestock unfurls. Farmer Boy is not so titled because it is the story of a young boy living on a farm, rather it describes how young Almanzo works to prove himself to his father as a farmer. With the conclusion showing his deepest desire fulfilled, it has the feel of a stand-alone piece and no sequel feels necessary.The strong theme of both Farmer Boy and the Little House books centres around the value of hard work. The young Almanzo is pressured by his spoilt cousin to ask his father for money for lemonade and while his father hands it over, he explains to his son just what has bought that money – their crops of potatoes, his mother’s butter, their work with the animals – and is it truly worth giving away for just a drink of lemonade? Chastened, Almanzo buys a suckling pig with it instead. The Wilders may be financially better-off than their future in-laws the Ingalls family, but their values are essentially the same. To be frank, they are the same as those of my own family – Laura Ingalls has always slightly reminded me of my own grandmother. A nice element to Farmer Boy was the way in which Mrs Wilder and the girls are shown as a key part of the family business; Almanzo’s mother sells her butter at a high price and is an important contributor to the family finances, the girls work just as the boys do. Nobody would ever have said that the Ingalls girls were allowed to slack off but their peripatetic existence meant that it was Pa who generally took the lead in any money-making scheme. Here, the family feels steadier and more assured – they are not battling to build a place to be but are instead assured of their roots within the community.I tried to think of what I would have thought of Farmer Boy had I not come to it due to its connection to Laura and truly, it is a very sweet-natured story about a young boy stoutly declaring his ambition to work the land. The adventures of Pioneer Girl may capture something more mythic about life on the American frontier but as Almanzo’s father points out, it was the farmers who truly built the nation and took it from a scrap of land to an entire country. In life, the Farmer Boy was a more than worthy companion to the Pioneer Girl and in fiction, Farmer Boy measures up well with its fellows in the series. It is more than just Little House for boys, it is a hymn in praise of farming as a profession as well as being a highly original love letter from a wife to her husband.
I loved all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, in particular "Little House in the Big Woods", "Little Town on the Prairie" and "These Happy Golden Years". They are books I can read and savor over and over again. But I just need to give a shout out to my absolute favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book, and that is "Farmer Boy"--to me, Farmer Boy is the under-appreciated middle child of the Laura Ingalls collection. People forget about it just because it doesn't start with "Little" or end with "Prairie". It is about Almanzo, who Laura eventually marries. There are several reasons why I love this book more than the others:1) Almanzo and his family are loaded. Well, compared to Laura they are. They run a much bigger farm than she does and the father is something of a gentleman farmer, not like the wild Charles who is all over the place and doesn't know what he's doing (let's be honest a lot of the books are based around the fact that Charles is a moron--first they leave the big woods, where the rest of their family is. Then they're stuck somewhere on the friggin prairie and have to ford the friggin river and almost lose Jack. Then they're living in some kind of underground burrow. Then they're starving through the winter because Charles is an idiot who can't provide for his family. This never happens to Almanzo's dad.)2) They take you through the whole farming season, from trashing the hay to cutting up the ice, to gathering potatoes in great, great detail. It's really a pleasure to read. It's also a big farm, like I mentioned so they're more commercial than the Ingalls' farm. You get to see the process of how, for example, they sell their butter, which is pretty cool.3) THE FOOD. I've never come across another book that is as lushly descriptive as this one in terms of food. I thought Harry Potter might do it at some point but it proved to disappoint in that respect. Being loaded + working from 5 AM in the fields before the days the dangers of saturated fats or Atkins were known = glorious food descriptions. I can't even begin to recount them but I urge that you check this book out for yourself. I'd also make sure to check it out with the original illustrations
What do You think about Farmer Boy (2007)?
Read this one with my 6 year old son and we are really enjoying it...this was a favorite when I was a girl...all of the "little House" books were...I am surprised at what huge plot details I forgot....for example, I didn't remember just how Mr. Corse, the seemingly milquetoast teacher, dealt with the big bad boys and was just as surprised as my son when the blacksnake whip came out...of course, by then I was committed, and my son was just as surprised, I think, that I had chosen a book with such an event in it! He really enjoyed the descriptions of how the children work, what they yearn for, where they take liberties with their assigned tasks and the dignified way in which they deal with outcomes....as in, when the oxen team run away with the sled...he really seemed to enjoy how self-sufficient Almanzo is as a child, and also how his parents *expect* him to be. Like other, we enjoyed the descriptions of the food. We also enjoyed the lavish praise the family members had for each other...they clearly had a great deal of family pride...all in all, a great book with such great descriptions of farm life it could be a "how to" manual, and several great messages, including "if you work and play hard outside in the snow all day, you can eat lots and lots of doughnuts and pie", but also the more general message of what hard work, honesty and integrity will do for your character and station. Read it with a kid, you will be guaranteed a giggle and a true warm fuzzy feeling!
—Kendra
I came back to this old childhood favorite because I am spending this summer working on a small vegetable farm. These books are every bit as wonderful as they were when I first read them as a child, although I notice different things now.This is certainly an idealized version of 19th-century American farming - the Wilder family farm is wonderfully prosperous and the main hardship of the story is that Almanzo's father does not think he is old enough to help train the horses. I suppose the fact that adults always idealize their own childhood, combined with the fact that this childhood was something Laura Ingalls Wilder heard about secondhand from her husband rather than experienced firsthand, leads to it being even more sugar-coated than the other books. But it's still incredibly charming, and there is something that appeals to me about the view of life and morality presented here - the incredible self-sufficiency of the farm is incredible to read about, and makes me secretly wish I had as many useful skills as any given character in the novel.The book also rivals the Redwall series with endless descriptions of mouth-watering meals. I wish I could eat like that as often as these characters do!
—Laura
I still didn't love it as well the first few books about Laura's childhood, perhaps because I know and love the Little House stories so well from my own childhood (I know my mom read me "Farmer Boy" but I don't really remember it). That said, I did quite enjoy and appreciate Almanzo's story this time and feel Laura deftly articulated his conundrums being on the cusp of boyhood and young-manhood, both his eagerness to do the more adult work on the farm with his father and older brother as well as the angst of having independent thoughts and wishes but not being able to express them most of the time. I appreciated his gentle, thoughtful nature and earnest desire to be a good, hard worker as well as his abundant love for animals and especially his desire to have a colt of his very own. I didn't feel the siblings and parents were as well-developed as Ma, Pa and Laura's sisters, though I did enjoy some of father Wilder's wisdom and his ultimate gift to his son (both the tangible one and the gift of letting his son chose his own future). Some of my favorite chapters included Independence Day, Keeping House, Christmas and the final chapter. I must say I was a bit shocked by the first few chapters which talk about the new school master and the abuse he (and the previous school teacher) endured from the big boys from town. It is rather violent and I would probably consider skipping those when I read this to my own son in the future.
—Kathryn
