The Long Winter

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Summary: Wow! This one is terribly exciting!
Review: I have embarked on the reading of the "Little House" book series, an historical account of the life of pioneer girl Laura Ingalls and her family. This is the 5th book in the series and it is by far the most exciting. Pa, Ma, Mary(who is now blind), Laura, Carrie and Grace get a new homestead but they must move into the town of DeSmet for the winter and they plan to build a house on their new land in the spring. Once settled in, Pa meets a mysterious old indian at the store who warns of a blizzard that will last seven months. And he is right. It comes in October and there is still blizzard in April. It is so cold where they live that there is ice in their bucket of water every morning so they must daily heat it on the stove in order to get water. To keep warm at night they put what is called a hot flatiron in their beds. I think they are pieces of the stove that go on burners. Like all the other books in this series, you learn interesting things: How do you get your horse out of a hole in the snow? How do you make a lamp out of a button and some grease? How do you ward off and treat frostbite? What do you do when all you have to eat for months is potatoes and just when you can't stand to eat one more potato you run out? Yes, they actually ran out of food! It happened twice in this book. You will learn what happens when a family runs out of food. You will learn what it is like to begin starving. You will see what 2 men did in their effort to save a whole town from starving. You will see how some people act when pushed to their very limits. The good and the bad come out in people. When Laura wakes up every morning, there is frost on the nails that hold their roof and walls together. The blizzard has howling, screaming winds with only one day break between 4 day long blizzards. The trains cannot run at all so no food or goods of any kind come into the town. When Christmas comes Laura makes presents for everyone in her family and she is the only one who doesn't get a present at all. But she never says this, you have to figure it out. The whole book covers just this one winter when Laura is thirteen years old.

There is one thing I always wanted to know that this book doesn't tell you either. How does Mary feel about becoming blind? She used to be "friend sisters" with Laura and they did everything together. Now Laura does these things with little Carrie who is now 10.

If you only plan to read one book in the "Little House" series, this one should be it. You'll be thankful for your furnace, your roof, and your food. You'll find out how easy you've got it, and how to be a hero. I'm not planning to read it again, I feel cold and hungry just thinking about it, it was too realistic. But I think it was really really good for the kids to see how good they have it.

Rating:
Summary: What I Think....
Review: Laura is a young girl with a wonderful family: two loving parents, an older sister Mary, and two younger sisters, Carrie and Grace. They are scared when they find out that the fist terrible storm is moments away. Blizzards strike the barren prairie in October and continue without dropping until April. It is too cold to do anything including going to school. As the cold creeps into the air, the family huddles together to keep warm. The people of De Smet are starving and running out of supplies as the train is delayed for many months. They try to use what they have the best that they can. It is young Almanzo Wilder who finally understands what needs to be done. He goes with a friend out of town on the snow and returns with wheat for everyone. But how long can that last? Finally, spring arrives and the trains come in. They receive clothes, food, and everything they need to survive.
I enjoyed reading thos book very much. Some parts were boring to read, but hey, you get the good with the bad. The book kept repeating itself alot. Once one blizzard ends another begins and the same story is retold. I found some nice parts that were exciting to read. I liked the descriptions used to detail the events. I could almost feel like I was there myself.
... After so many months of blizzards, the people of De Smet had smiling faces. They were glad to have survived the long winter. Now they could be warm and do their outside chores which were difficult to do before. Overall, I would advise you to read this book. It is definitely bot the best, but good enough to read and enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: You'll get cold just reading it.
Review: The cover on this book is very misleading, showing children happily playing in the snow. In fact, the book is a description of an unbelievably long, devastatingly cold South Dakota winter in which the Ingalls family struggled for survival. This is a good book for a hot summer day -- just reading it will chill you down.
My question is this: After the long winter finally ended, why didn't Pa Ingalls immediately load the family into a wagon and head for south Texas to grow grapefruit? Just kidding, of course, but as a life-long Texan I have a hard time understanding people who live in South Dakota today, with heated houses and cars. It boggles the mind that people lived there in Laura Ingalls' day, when they had to tie up bundles of straw to put in the stove and generate a paltry amount of heat to keep from freezing to death.

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Summary: EXTRA ! EXTRA ! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Review: THE LONG WINTER by Laura Ingalls Wilder is a non-fiction story which tells about her interesting pioneer life.The book describes Laura's life in the prairies during a winter in the late 1870's. It tells how she and her family survive the long hard winter that year. It talks about how hard it was to find enough food for everyone.The chidren had to keep up with their school lessons at home because the blizzards were so strong that they had to stay inside.I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to about what it was like in other times in history. In conclusion this is a great book to learn what it was like to be a pioneer in the 1870's.

Rating:
Summary: The Long Winter
Review: This Book is a great book because, it is depended on a true story about the person wrote the book, Laura Ingalls Wilder. So far I have read almost the whole set of these great books and I think that the books were exciting and also fantastic. In this book The Long Winter it was hard for the family to survive a very long winter around 8 months that had hard snow with barely any supplies because of the blizzards. The blizzard made the Ingalls have a hard time because the snow made the train with the supplies to take to their town imppossible to make it there so, they had to use Mary's college money to pay for food and warmth because, in the store they raised the price on everything. My favorite part was when the two men went into the storm and got wheat for the store in the big storm. What got me mad was shopkeeper paid for the wheat but charged so much over the price. But the 2 men stood up and said something so he lowered the price of the wheat and sold the wheat to the costumers for the original price that those 2 men got from the man who sold it to them.

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Summary: Tale of winter of deprivation leaves you inspired
Review: We have just finished reading this fifth book in the Laura series with our five year old daughter - she has loved all of them. I can recall reading this as a child, and the impression of the hunger, hardship, and courage of the Ingalls family stayed with me. I thought it might be a little dark for my daughter, but she really enjoyed it. We heartily recommend the entire series, even for children who are not able to read it independently yet - she started the series two months ago when she turned five, and we have read it virtually every night since (Little House in the Big Woods, on the Prairie, Banks of Plum Creek, etc.). It really is an interesting way to introduce American history, settling of the West, etc., into a child's life, especially a girl's. My younger daugther, 3, enjoys it too, but has a shorter attention span. The two of them play "Laura & Mary" all the time, and have demonstrated via their imaginary play that not just the spirit but the detail of the stories have made an impression. I don't think we have "ruined" it for them by reading it to them before they could read it on their own - I think they will return to these stories later.