Little House in the Big Woods is the first book in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. My set has the same Garth Williams illustration shown on the left, only my books have a blue background. I think his illustrations are wonderful and add a lot to the stories.

In this opening book, Laura is portrayed as five years old, but according to Wikipedia she was actually three: the publishers changed her age in the stories “because it seemed unrealistic for a three-year-old to have specific memories such as she wrote about.” And I had thought these pretty remarkable memories even for a five year old!

Of course, much of what she wrote about were probably activities that were repeated throughout her life, such as butchering and smoking a hog, making maple syrup and sugar, laying up food for the winter, planting and harvest, etc., so I suppose the details were imprinted on her mind almost without effort. Sprinkled throughout are family stories handed down, songs that Pa played on his fiddle on winter evenings, customs and proverbs of the day.

But even though this is all fascinating historically, it doesn’t read like a history lesson: it reads like a warm family story with old-fashioned but always ever needed “family values”: love of family, respect for parents, obedience, industriousness, thrift, and so on.

There were several things that were amazing to me: that Laura and Mary had not seen a town or a store or even two houses together yet in their young lives (their first trip to town is a major event later in the book); that they used every bit of their resources, even to roasting a pig’s tail and using its bladder for a ball; the sheer amount of knowledge, skill, and energy it took to live in those times; contentment with what we would think of today as very little. Laura plays with an old corn cob as a doll named Susan, and even when she got a new doll, she didn’t want to make “Susan” jealous.

Even the children were expected to work hard and not to complain. Yet they didn’t seem to resent it: they just took it as a matter of course.

And Paul’s twinkling eyes and good humor and Ma’s gentleness, Christmas celebrations and get-togethers with extended family all smoothed some of the rough edges of life.

I so enjoyed revisiting with the Ingalls family a bit for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge. It’s easy to see why these books are beloved children’s classics, and I hope they will be for a many years to come. Yet even though they are written for children, they are beloved and read by adults as well.

Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Stephen Hines, is a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles Laura wrote between 1911 and 1925 before she wrote the Little House books. I have looked at bits and pieces of this but I’ve never read it all the way through, and I wanted to do so for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge this month.

There are over 140 articles or columns arranged by topic, and the topics range from WWI, women’s progress, and “the greatness and goodness of God,” but most are just observations drawn from everyday life.

Laura was very opinionated, especially in preferring farm or country life over town life. But in other ways she was very broad-minded. She was remarkably well read for having only two terms of high school: she quotes from several authors. She had a natural innate curiosity about the world around her and never wanted to stop learning about it. And for being a farmer’s wife tucked away in Mansfield, Missouri, she kept up on politics and current events quite well. There is even a section on fairies. But she valued a woman’s role in her home above all else.

She also reflected on her upbringing a lot and mentions several incidents that showed up in her later books.

One of my favorite columns is from January 1920, titled “The Man of the Place,” which was what Laura called Almanzo in these columns. She records their grumbling over the amount of work on their shoulders and the lack of time to get it all done, then they both recalled that their parents worked long into the night spinning, sewing, sorting their produce, while they themselves had club work and magazines to read in the evenings. They reminisced that their parents did enjoy their lives, though they were so busy. “If we expect to enjoy life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals…or when we have nothing else to do” (p. 66). Then they concluded they weren’t really having such a hard time after all.

Another is titled “The Old Dash Churn.” Her husband had bought her a new butter churn that was supposed to make butter in three minutes. But it was supposed to connect to a motor, and they had none, so she had to hold it steady in a certain position with one hand and turn the handle with the other. Plus the blades were sharp and frequently cut her hands. She gave it a good try because her husband had bought it to please her and make her work easier, but it was making it more troublesome instead. She told him the problems she was having and asked him several times to bring back the old dash church, but he just said, “Oh, this one is so much better: you can churn in three minutes…” One day when the churn was being “particularly annoying” she picked up the whole thing and threw it as far as she could. When she told her husband, he said, “I wish I had known that you did not want to use it. I would like to have the wheels and shaft, but they’re ruined now.” I’m not telling it as she did, but it just struck me so funny because she HAD told him repeatedly. But she didn’t generally make a habit of throwing things when she was aggravated. 🙂

A few favorite quotes:

“Let’s be cheerful! We have no more right to steal the brightness out of the day for our own family than we have to steal the purse of a stranger. Let us be as careful that our homes are furnished with pleasant and happy thoughts as we are that the rugs are the right color and texture and the furniture comfortable and beautiful” (p. 37).

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all” (p. 52).

Quoting a friend who was “home schooling” and had a daughter who was not as academic as her brothers, preferring sewing to studying: “I know what her talent is, but she has to have her books, too: and she will sew all the better for having ‘book learning'” (p. 54).

“So much depends upon the homemakers. I sometimes wonder if they are so busy now with other things that they are forgetting the importance of this special work….Because of their importance, we must not neglect our homes in the rapid changes of the present day. For when tests of character come in later years, strength to the good will not come from the modern improvements or amusements few may have enjoyed but from the quiet moments and the ‘still small voices’ of the old home. Nothing ever can take the place of this early home influence; and as it does not depend upon externals, it may be the possession of the poor as well as of the rich” (p. 64).

“Now it isn’t enough in any garden to cut down the weeds….cultivating the garden plants is just as necessary. If we want vegetables, we must make them grow, not leave the ground barren where we have destroyed the weeds. Just so, we must give much of our attention to the improvements we want, not all to the abuses we would like to correct” (p. 94).

“We are coming, I think, to depend too much on being shown and told and taught instead of using our own eyes and brains and inventive faculties” (p. 122).

“It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our everyday duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt to take us at our own valuation” (p. 130).

“Just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women’s work at home, while only the doing of little things, is like the golden gleam of sunlight that runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization” (p. 207).

“Here and there one sees a criticism of Christianity because of the things that have happened [during WWI]….’Christianity has not prevented these things, therefore it is a failure’ some say. But this is a calling of things by the wrong names. It is rather the lack of Christianity that has brought us where we are. Not a lack of churches or religious forms but of the real thing in our hearts” (p. 265).

In a column about how pies were invented, “Its originator was truly an artist, as though she had written a poem or painted a picture, for she had used her creative instinct and imagination with a fine technique” (p. 282).

I enjoyed so much getting to know Laura better through these columns.

After I got my iPhone and got ready to find some audiobooks, I opened a trial account at Audible.com. Looking around for my first book to try, I happened upon The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I’d seen it mentioned and highly recommended, so I bought it.

For some reason it didn’t even occur to me that with this being modern secular fiction, there would likely be some bad language. I hadn’t recalled any of the bloggers I’d read mentioning it (for the record I do very much appreciate when reviewers mention these things so readers can take this into account.) By this reviewer’s count (which I hadn’t seen before listening to the book) there are about two dozen expletives, several of them taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Now, I am not naive. I grew up in an unsaved home and public schools, so I know people use such language. I really don’t hear it by and large in everyday life now, but my oldest son, who works with the general public (when they’re having computer problems and therefore upset) says he hears it all the time. But I don’t like to read or listen to it and fill my mind with it so that the next time I am frustrated, one of those words come flying into my thoughts. And I especially don’t like hearing the dearest name in the world brought down to such a level. Yet if I set out to purge every source of such words from my life I’d have to avoid some members of my extended family forever (as it is I have to delete about every other Facebook post from some of them). We live in a fallen world, so we’re going to encounter those things. Yet there is a difference between being unable to avoid it in some cases and voluntarily bringing it in for entertainment in others. I don’t think there is ever a case where it is really needed to make the story realistic. I don’t know if anyone ever gets to the end of a book and thinks, “You know, that was really good except it needed a few bad words.”

So…I wrestle with that. I really do. That’s one reason why I usually read Christian fiction and avoid modern secular work. In some cases the work itself supersedes these kinds of flaws, yet the flaws of such language may be enough to avoid it. I’m still working on that, but I wanted to put this at the forefront.

As for the rest of the book: it is excellent. The story is told from the viewpoint of three different women in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s:

Aibileen is a maid for Elizabeth Leefolt and looks after her daughter, Mae Mobley, who is the seventeenth white child Aibileen has helped raise. Mrs. Leefolt is considerably lacking in the maternal affection department, and Aibileen tries to make up for it by often telling Mae Mobley, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” Aibileen is the voice of calmness, common sense, and what spirituality is in the book, being noted for her prayer list.

Miss Skeeter is a friend of Elizabeth’s who often comes over to play bridge. Her family’s maid, whom she was closer to than her own mother, disappeared some time earlier, and Skeeter is hurt and mystified over where she went, why she left, and why no one will tell her anything. Skeeter, more than the other white ladies, seems to see and treat “the help” as real people. She’s finished college at Ole Miss and wants to be a writer.

Minnie is feisty, keeps losing jobs because of her tendency to mouth off, but is known for her exceptional cooking. There are only two people Minnie can’t face down: her drunken, abusive husband, and Hilly Holbrook.

Hilly is the self-appointed leader of her circle of friends and the president of the League. She decides to promote a bathroom initiative requiring every white household to build a separate bathroom for the colored help so that they don’t catch diseases from each other. Hilly is the ultimate control freak. Anyone dissenting from her viewpoint is not merely disagreeable. They must be crushed and ruined.

One other major character is Celia Foote, “white trash” who married up, pathetically trying to break into the community of white ladies and not understanding why none of them returns her calls.

Skeeter lands a job at the newspaper, writing a Miss Myrna column of housecleaning tips. She’s thrilled to have a writing job but has never cleaned anything in her life, so she asks Elizabeth if she can talk to Aibileen from time to time to ask her questions for her column. In the friendship that develops, Skeeter gets an idea: writing a book from the point of view of the help. I don’t recall if it was stated whether she just thinks this is a good angle for a book or if she is motivated in the beginning by any altruistic desire (one disadvantage of an audiobook is not being able to flip back through pages to try to find out), but it is not long before her eyes are opened and she sees this as more than just a project. She contacts an editor in New York who tells her to give it a try “before this civil rights thing blows over.”

It’s dangerous, both for Skeeter and Aibileen. Skeeter could be ruined socially and Aibileen could be harmed physically, as well as lose her job (and any job in the town). They meet secretly to work on the book. Then Skeeter’s editor tells her she needs to interview a dozen maids. No one else is willing to talk to her…until a tragedy in their midst convinces them they need to tell their stories. But another tragedy, the murder of Medgar Evers in the maids’ neighborhood, heightens the danger.

As the project continues, warmth and understanding unfolds on both sides — for there is prejudice on both sides (a colored doctor refusing to operate on a white boy’s hand when he loses his fingers is one example). There is even more to poor Celia than initially meets the eye.

The story was wonderfully told with both humor and pathos. The voices, the vernacular were right on.

The production values of the audiobook version were fantastic. Four actresses read the different sections, but at no point did I have the feeling someone was reading a book to me. At one point when I was recalling a particular scene, it was so vivid in my mind I had to remind myself I didn’t actually see it. It was enjoyable to hear the accents as well: one of my pet peeves is fake Southern accents, but for the most part these were genuine.

Overall, except for the instances of bad language and a couple of cases of vulgarity, I loved the book. I mentioned another review above: both it and the comments are very insightful.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

I got the audiobook version of Vicious Cycle by Terri Blackstock when someone posted on Facebook that it was free at GoBible.com for a limited time (it is no longer free at this time). I’ve enjoyed many of Terri’s books and hadn’t read anything by her in a while, so I snapped it up.

This is the second book in her Intervention series . The first book, also titled Intervention, was written several year’s after Terri’s own daughter was trapped in and then delivered from drug addiction. I had not read that one, but there were enough references in this book that I felt I had a basic enough understanding of the points of reference connecting the books.

In this book, Emily Covington is about to finish a year of treatment in a drug rehab facility. One of her friends there, Jordan, leaves the facility, goes home, unexpectedly goes into labor and gets high on meth to handle the pain. She doesn’t go to the hospital partially because she waited too late but partially because her own drug-crazed mother won’t take her. When Jordan wakes up and comes to her senses, she discovers her mother has plans to sell the baby. When Emily’s brother, Lance, comes to Jordan’s house to try to talk her into going back into treatment, Jordan desperately hides the baby in his car to get her away from her mother. Lance doesn’t realize she has done this until he leaves, then, he decides to take the baby home, thinking Jordan will come for her soon. But it is obvious something is wrong with the baby. Just as he decides to take the baby to the hospital, his car is surrounded by police and Lance is arrested for kidnapping.

Lance’s mother, Barbara, calls the detective who helped in her daughter’s case, Kent, and together they try to clear Lance, decide what’s best for the baby, and help Jordan to understand that though she has so many strikes available, a new life is possible with God’s help. When they discover evidence of a baby-trafficking ring, they realize that Jordan’s baby as well as others are in more serious danger than they had thought.

People who accuse Christian fiction of being too pristine to be realistic have not read Terri Blackstock. Somehow she portrays the gritty realism of drug addiction without making us feel we’ve been dragged through the gutter. There is enough there to be convincing without overdoing it.

My husband and I have had family members on both sides who have gotten involved with drugs, sadly, and we recognized the pattern of their behavior in Jordan and her mother. Emily, in the first book, had come from a good family. Jordan’s family is part of her problem rather than a solution or a support. Yet both girls had to realize where true help comes from and be willing to lay hold on it.

I very much enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next one, Downfall, which, incidentally, can be pre-ordered in a e-book version for $4.99 before the end of February. I have my order in!

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

I’ve listened to one and a half audiobooks now and thought I’d pass along my thoughts on them. Several years ago we also listened to the Focus on the Family Radio Theater productions of Chronicles of Narnia and Les Miserables, but I think those were dramatizations rather than readings.

In general I would still prefer actual books. I just prefer reading that way and I like being able to mark specific passages, to linger over some spots or reread them, or trip a little more lightly through others. Plus I can read with other people around and still be available to them: with an audiobook, I either have ear buds in or am in another room, so I tend to listen to them when alone. That’s not really a problem unless it’s a really exciting part of the book and I’d love to listen to a few pages but can’t!

However, audiobooks have helped immensely with driving time. It’s about a 20-minute drive to my mother-in-law’s place and to a few other destinations, and I’m hardly aware of the time going by, whereas beforehand I was chafing at the time in the car not accomplishing anything except moving from one destination to another. I’ve also started listening to them while getting ready in the mornings and want to incorporate them while exercising or house-cleaning.

I don’t think I could listen to a non-fiction book that way that wasn’t in story form. Those kinds of books take a little more concentration, anyway, and I tend to mark passages, place sticky tabs all over to try to help me retain information from them. I could listen to them and glean something, I’m sure, but I just wouldn’t get the full benefit of them just by listening. That might be a good way to review a book I’ve already read, though, or preview one I plan to read.

I am more of a visual learner. A few times just when my attention has lagged or I’ve forgotten something in the audiobook that I can’t then go back and look up (without listening to significant portions again), I’ve wondered how difficult it must have been for people to retain Scripture when they primarily heard it, when they didn’t have written portions for everyone, when the Colossians got a letter from Paul that was read at their assembly. I don’t know how easy it would have been to make copies. They were probably more trained to really listen then than we are now, but I am still glad to have lived in an era of the written word.

But I find I am enjoying audiobooks immensely at times when I can’t get into a paper book.

I started a trial subscription on Audible.com that is $7-something a month for the first three months, and you’re able to get one credit (which usually gets you one book) each month. After that trial period it goes up to the regular $14-something a month, which seems pretty high to me. If I am going to pay that much I’d rather get the actual book. I’m not sure why they’re that expensive: I know the author needs to be paid royalties and the reader and producers need to be paid, but it seems if you’re making one file that multiples of people can download, that would be less expensive than making multiple copies of the actual book. So I may drop the Audible account after that, I’m not sure.

I have discovered some good resources in learnoutloud.com and http://gobible.com/. They’re regular prices seem expensive but they do have good sales or occasional free downloads.

How about you: do you know of any good resources for audiobooks? Do you enjoy them? What is your experience?

Stephen W. Hines read the Little House books several times as a child and then introduced them to his wife after they were married. Upon finding that Laura had been a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist before she wrote her books, Hines published those columns together in a book, Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder (I’m a little over halfway through with that one). He heard from many readers who loved and wanted to know more about Laura. He discovered no one had ever conducted interviews with the people who knew her at her last home in Mansfield, Missouri, so he decided to do so, publishing those and several articles by and about Laura in I Remember Laura. This book, then, is not so much a biography as it is a companion book to Laura’s other work or to biographies of her. At its publication (in 1994), Hines felt that there had not been a definitive biography of Laura written which included new papers and letters that had since come to light.

These articles and interviews are grouped into sections, the two biggest being reminiscences of her life in De Smet, South Dakota, where many of the Little House books took place, and then reminiscences of Mansfield, Missouri, where she spent most of her adult life. There are other sections on “Women in the 1920s” and “Laura and Rose,” her daughter. There is a bit of overlap with Hines’ book of her columns: he reprints a few of them here.

Laura was in her mid-60s when she began writing the Little House books. It seems they began as a way to preserve family memories. There is a bit of controversy over whether publication was her idea or her daughter Rose’s, and several people take credit for urging her to make a book out of them. But however they came to be, her town of 800 had thought she and her husband were retired, and then “took many years to become reconciled to Mrs. Wilder’s latter-day fame as a story-teller.” Many people the author talked to began by saying, “If I had only known that she would become famous, I would have paid more attention to what she said and did” (p. 61). It’s a little ironic that some of the people Hines interviewed said they hadn’t read her books until she either gave them a copy (they were expensive back then at $2.75 🙂 ) or until they got to know her a bit. It’s amusing, then, that in a piece on the Wilders for Mansfield’s centennial album, one writer says, “We know Laura was special. But there has to be something special about the town that provided the environment necessary for her talent to shine through” (p. 274).

Most remember the Wilders as fairly quiet people who kept to themselves, Almanzo especially, but many had memories of visiting with Laura or seeing her in town. She was generally regarded as friendly and industrious. At the dedication of the local library, it was noted she was “famous in her own community for her fine needlework, delicious gingerbread, and in general known as a good neighbor” (p. 269).

When asked why she didn’t write more books, one time she replied that the money she received from them cost her more in taxes. “She never found taxes on those who had labored their way to prosperity to be an incentive for even more labor” (p. 97). But another time she said that if she wrote more, she’d have to get into some of the sad times of her life (p. 122).

Her first years with Almanzo were pretty sad, marked by the loss of a baby, years of drought and crop failure, then his diptheria and a stroke which left him unable to work a full day. They arrived in Mansfield in that condition, with enough money to put a payment down on a rocky piece of land where they literally built an existence with their bare hands, cutting and selling wood until they could grow crops and build a house. That is truly amazing to me: I don’t know if most people these days would have either the knowledge or the spirit to do such a thing. “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm” and “My Apple Orchard” tell in their own words how they started and then improved upon the grounds and land through the years.

A few other highlights I noted:

When a friend commented that life begins at forty, Laura replied, “No, dearie. It begins at eighty” (p. 134).

She told another friend how, after her sister Mary became blind, Laura “would make word pictures for Mary so she could ‘see'” (p. 136). Perhaps that was early training for the stories she would write later on.

It was especially interesting to me that, with all the opportunities opened to women as a result of their needing to work in a variety of places during WWI, she wasn’t against those opportunities, but she urged, “We must advance logically, in order, and all together if the ground gained is to be held. If what has hitherto been woman’s work, in the world, is simply left undone by them, there is no one else to take it up. If in their haste to do other, perhaps more showy things, their old and special work is neglected and only half done, there will be something seriously wrong with the world, for the commonplace, home work of women is they very foundation upon which everything else rests” (p. 170). She was at least one voice who didn’t dismiss that “home work” as drudgery or demeaning but rather as a meaningful contribution to home and society.

I hadn’t realized before that there was a bit of controversy over how much Laura’s daughter, Rose, contributed to the writing of the Little House books. Rose was a known writer and editor, and speculation runs from the thought that Rose only advised her mother and used her own connections to get the books published, to the other extreme that Laura’s writing only the bare bones of the books, and Rose arranged and ghost-wrote much of them. The truth is likely in-between.

There are a few photos of Laura throughout the book, and to me she seems one of those rare people who become prettier as they get older.

There are even a few recipes in the book. Hines and his family tried many of them. Most came out fine, but the results of a few left them wondering if what constituted a successful cake or dish then might be different from our preferences mow.

The book was a little dry in places: many of the interviews Hines conducted and published cover some of the same information, and perhaps that  could have been summarized and harmonized rather than recorded individually. But his affection for Laura shines through.

Overall this was an interesting book that gave a fuller picture of Laura in her adult years and helped separate fact from fiction.

On another note, I didn’t realize until last night that Februray 7 was Laura’s 145th birthday. I had originally chosen February as the month for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge specifically because her birth and death both occurred in February, but it didn’t even occur to me to have a “birthday party” or some kind of special remembrance of her on that day. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next year.

Welcome to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge!

Many of us grew up reading the Little House on the Prairie series, unwittingly getting our first taste of American history and laughing and sorrowing along with the Ingalls family. Every time I read them, at different ages and stages of life, I get a little something more or something different out of them and I enjoy them all over again. That is a characteristic of a true classic.

After participating in a couple of Carrie‘s reading challenges and discovering how fun it is to read an author at the same time with others, I decided to host a reading challenge based on Laura.

You can read the Little House books (any one or all of them if you’re up to that!), a biography of her, or any book somehow related to her. If you’d like to prepare a meal from the Ingalls’ recipes or do some other related project, we’d love to see it! You can read or do as little or as much as you’d like.

In the comments below you can leave a link to your blog post about what you plan to do for the challenge (or just tell us in the comments if you’d rather), and at the end of the challenge on Feb. 29, four weeks from today, I’ll post a wrap-up post so everyone can tell us how they did. I would encourage you to write a wrap-up post listing what you read and perhaps what you learned or enjoyed (or didn’t) about your reading time. If you want to write reviews of the individual books as you read them and then list your reviews in your wrap-up, that would be great, too.

I’ve had several books relating to Laura on my shelf unread for years, I am embarrassed to say, and I’d like to read them for this challenge. They are:

I Remember Laura by Stephen Hines. It’s not exactly a biography: the author states it is more a mosaic or cornucopia of letters, poems, columns, etc. from Laura and from various other people that shed more light on her life.

Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines. This is a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles Laura wrote before she wrote the Little House books, arranged by subject. I have looked at bits and pieces of this but I’ve never read it all the way through.

Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines.

I don’t know how I came to have three books written or edited by Stephen Hines!

I’d also like to reread at least the first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods. If I have time I may read the next one as well.

I usually go through nonfiction much more slowly than fiction, so to have three nonfiction titles in a month is pushing it. But I’ve also hand on hand for a while The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure about seeking “the Laura experience” by going to some of the places and doing some of the activities mentioned in the books. I’m wary of it — I got kind of burned by recent experiences with modern secular books and bad language, and I’ve been told this is “irreverent,” and I am not quite sure how that will play out. But if I have time I might give it a try.

So…those are my plans. Will you join me? What are you planning to read?

Thanks to the Grab My Button Code Generator for the button and grab box below!

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The end of January brings with it the end of Carrie‘s Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge.

My plan in my initial post was to pick up where I left off last year in rereading the Anne books. I only committed to reading the next two, but I secretly was hoping I’d finish the last four so I could start off next year reading some of LMM’s other books. And just finished the last book, Rilla of Ingleside, yesterday afternoon.

Here is what I read with links to my reviews:

Anne’s House of Dreams, about Anne and Gilbert’s first year of marriage. Loved this — it’s vying with the first book, Anne of Green Gables, for my favorite of the series. Love the mixture of blissful first days together with sorrow, the familiar characters and new memorable ones in Captain Jim and Leslie Moore.

Anne of Ingleside, Anne as a mother of five children, with a sixth coming during the book. It’s neat to see Anne’s exuberance “tamed” a bit — maybe “matured” would be a better word. Most of the focus is on the children, and many of their misunderstandings are good reminders that things are processed differently by them.

Rainbow Valley focuses more on the children than Anne, but even more on a new set of children belonging to the new widowed minister. Not one of my favorites of the series, but still a good read.

Rilla of Ingleside focuses mainly on Anne’s youngest daughter and her maturing from kind of a vain frothy teen to a sweet, mature woman during the course of the hardships of WWI. Love this book.

Seeing less of Anne as the books go on reminds me of someone’s lament once over seeing pictures of only their friend’s children in Christmas cards, “But we want to see you, too!” But Carrie pointed out that LMM only kept writing about Anne at her publisher’s insistence, so she was probably getting tired of her by then, plus she was writing these books primarily to younger people, I believe, so it’s natural the focus would be on the youth.

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting these books again. Some of LMM’s rapturous descriptions and and the eccentricity of some characters is a bit over the top and seems more so each time I read them (whether that’s due to my advancing age or increased familiarity with the books, I don’t know), but there is still enough else that I really like about her that I can forgive that. There is a wholesomeness about them and a sweetness that in my opinion is just right without going overboard. I like the emphasis on the nobleness of doing good and right.

Thanks to Carrie for hosting! And stay tuned here tomorrow for the beginning of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge!

Rilla of Ingleside is the eighth and last in my set of Anne of Green Gables books by L. M. Montgomery. Rilla, Anne’s youngest child, is 15. All her brothers and sisters are in various levels of higher education, but Rilla has no educational ambitions: “There’s bound to be one dunce in every family. I’m quite willing to be a dunce if I can be a pretty, popular, delightful one” (p. 16).

A passing note in the newspaper about the murder of some “Archduke man” “in foreign parts” makes little impression on the Ingleside folks, unaware as they are that this is the beginning of the Great War, or as it later came to be called, World War I. But all too soon the call comes for service and Anne’s two oldest boys enlist – cheery Jem, ready to take on the world, and quiet, poetic Walter, lover of beauty, loathing ugliness and evil, yet compelled to do his duty.

Other friends and playmates from the Glen answer the call as well, ushering in four long years of waiting, checking the news every day, keeping track of everyone’s condition, war efforts at home from rationing to fund-raising. Spirits rise and fall with the daily news of battles won and lost and loved ones wounded, missing, or dead.

Rilla has to grow up fast, and though her mother laments that she has become a woman too soon, she rejoices in the help she is to her.

I’ve read many books set in WWII, but WWI wasn’t as familiar to me. This book was originally published in 1921 and the war ended in 1918, so it was still relatively fresh in the minds of its early readers. The facts were interesting, and the long weight of it on family members back home was realistic. There was a general spirit of everyone pulling together in both world wars that seems to have been absent in wars ever since. I’m still pondering that.

Of the eight books, this one ranks behind the first Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams in my list of favorites. There is both laughter and sorrow, idiosyncrasies and poignancy.

A couple of favorite quotes: the first night of hearing that England had declared war on Germany, “Rilla told herself pathetically that she felt years older than when she had left home that evening. Perhaps she did — perhaps she was. Who knows? It does not do to laugh at the pangs of youth” (p. 34).

And from Susan, Ingleside cook and housekeeper, on the “right” to pride in a certain matter: “Pride is cold company” (p. 208).

One of the things I enjoy about LMM’s books is the little ironic asides she inserts from time to time. I love that she doesn’t draw undue attention to them, leaving them for the reader to discover and chuckle over. In one in this book, Susan is talking about an old quarrel with a cousin: “We quarreled when we were children over who should get a Sunday School card with the words ‘God is love,’ wreathed in rosebuds, on it, and have never spoken to each other since” (p. 9). Though such a quarrel in real life would not be a laughing matter, the absurdity of a feud lasting for years over a sentiment about God’s love makes the reader smile and shake her head over such foolishness.

I loved this book, loved seeing Rilla grow and mature, though parts of the process were painful. And though it is kind of sad to be at the end of the Anne books, it is satisfying as well. I’ll look forward to reading some of LMM’s other books for next year’s LMM challenge.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

The title of Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery is taken from an area where the Blythe children play which they named. In this seventh of LMM’s Anne series, the action picks up just after the place where it left off in Anne of Ingleside. Anne’s four older children are joined in the valley by four new children from the manse. The Presbyterian church has got a new minister, but they hadn’t known beforehand that he was a widower. He in an excellent preacher, but is a bit absent-minded, easily lost in his thoughts or a good book to the point of forgetting to keep tabs on his children. That causes a series of scrapes and misunderstandings, mostly comical though some are scandalous to the town and especially the congregation.

It’s an interesting story in itself, but, for being in the Anne series, there is very little of Anne in it and even less of Gilbert. Anne seems to be the voice of reason and balance, seeing the humor in the various situations that come up and defending the children. Anne’s children are best friends with the manse children and interact with them often through the book, but still the focus seems to be on the latter. I’m curious as to why Montgomery focused on the manse family in this book — whether the Blythe children were not likely to get into some of the situations the manse children were, or whether perhaps as a pastor’s wife she wanted to shed a bit of light on how a pastor’s family, particularly the children, can feel with the watching eyes of the church and community on them and how the most innocent of actions can be blown into a major scandal by gossip and a lack of charitableness. If any of you have read of the background behind this one, I’d love to hear it.

I thought Rosemary West’s story was very sad and sweet, and I loved the glimpses into Mr. Meredith’s (the pastor’s) thinking and struggles when he was “awake,” as one of the children’s friend’s called it when he was focused. There’s foreshadowing of the coming war. I’ve read this series before, but I can’t remember which of Anne’s sons goes off to war in the next book (don’t tell me — I want to find out in the book). I wonder whether there will be any romances between the Blythe children and the manse children as they grow up (if so, perhaps that’s another reason for the focus on the manse children here.)

I’d have to say this isn’t my favorite of the Anne series, but it is still very good.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)