Saturday, December 12, 2020

Review: By the Shores of Silver Lake

By the Shores of Silver Lake By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With this book I'm finally caught up in the big gap I missed by reading Little House in the Big Woods and then skipping everything until The Long Winter. I must admit that this mode of reading things, rather like the original order of the Narnia books, has its own charm. The characters I knew as girls were suddenly tough as nails pioneer girls (even Mary for all her blindness and daintiness). I think parents must look at their rapidly growing children like this.

Now, I've had the pleasure of watching Laura grow up, at a time when I myself, am no longer a little girl or a young teenager. I can read about the old stories the Ingalls laughed about, the moonpath, the fairy ring, Ma keeping boarders, and finally understand the joke. But it isn't Laura's own musings on her own mortality that give me pause, rather, this is the first book in the bunch where I realized how young and inexperienced Caroline and Charles Ingalls must have been, how many mistakes they made along the way and all their myriad consequences.

In the Big Woods and Indian territory, they must have been even younger and even less prepared, but we experienced them with Laura, as her infallible, wonderful parents. By the time The Long Winter had arrived Pa and Ma have grown wiser, quicker on the uptake. They've settled down and take only the risks that luck throws at them. They don't go around moving to new places and ignoring phrases such as "grasshopper weather".

This book, where Laura begins to grow up, is the last where her parents appear as flawed people I think. Glimpses of this same thing can be seen in Plum Creek too. They lose Grace, they nearly lose their claim. Later books are genteel and civilized in the face of adversity. Here I can see the Wild West encroaching upon the Ingalls. I find it somehow comforting, to see Ma and Pa struggle like humans, like a young couple with four children, instead of like the hard-working, stoic face of the pioneer movement.

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