the candy they made by drizzling the syrup on a frying pan filled with snow.

I read all the books and this is the only thing that sticks with me. Maybe because Mom let me try it but it wasn't cold enough that day so I ended up eating it with a spoon. yum!

I got rid of my set when I went to college, but several years ago, I repurchased all of the DeSmet books (On the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years) as well as Farmer Boy (Almanzo's childhood book). Those later books definitely hold up under adult reading eyes.

You really should read the early books just to get to know the family and backstory, but the later books are great and definitely not insipid.

Laura is presented as a truly flawed character, even as a child, which was a first in childrens lit for me as a kid. She's rambunctious, envious of her sister's perfect behavior and good looks (I love when Mary reveals her inner demons to Laura as an adult in the final book!), rebellious, and very much her father's daughter and fails to really relate to her mother as a result, at least until she becomes a young woman herself.

The books are a character study of Laura, and we get a complete view of her, from her opinions on religion (she's a believer, appreciates the poetry of the Bible, but evangelical fervor frightens her) to her obvliviousness to her appeal to young men around her (Almanzo woos her for a good month before she finally gets past thinking he's just being nice to her because he's a friend of her father's).

(Oh, and LIW as an author does disguise the fact that Almanzo first noticed her when she was only fourteen, and escorted her home from the revival when she was fifteen, and he was ten years older. In the books, she shaves at least three years off his actual age to make the courtship less unsavory.)

I think part of the reason the series didn't appeal to me as a kid was because I grew up in farm country, surrounded by people very good at making due in harsh conditions, and I wanted to read about people who lived in cities and told other sorts of stories than what my grandmother told me for hours on end.

Damn, I miss Grandma's corn meal mush. I have never been able to figure out how she made it so damned good.

In the books, she shaves at least three years off his actual age to make the courtship less unsavory.

Yeah, that always made me a bit twitchy, how young she was.

It's odd: girls are maturing younger now, and yet back then it was not unusual for girls to be considered women at 14 or 15... when it's entirely possible they weren't yet even capable of child-bearing.

In On the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura and Lena go to pick up the laundry from another woman who's a bit frazzled due to her daughter having just gotten married the day before. The daughter was 13, only a year older than Laura, and both of the girls are completely freaked over the idea of getting married so young.

Oh, and the dugout near Walnut Grove has been reduced to just a small depression in the bank, from the photos I've seen in a book called Little House Country," which is photos of all of the homes and towns mentioned in the books. The Surveyors House that they lived in the year of On the Shores of Silver Lake is the only remaining house from the original books, and it's been moved to the center of DeSmet and is now a gift shop/museum.

Women had far fewer public rights and responsibilities, though. If they were never going to be judged capable of voting their consciences anyway, then the transition between answering to a father and answering to a husband wasn't that big a transition. (If you'll recall, Laura notifies Almanzo with great care that she will not be reciting the "obey" segment of the standard marriage vow for women, which kind of made her radical.)

Lack of sexual maturity is one of those weird ways in which the past is a different country: I strongly suspect that marriages were considerably less sexually active, in that time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if marriages were, especially at first, a matter of finding a helpmeet and an extra pair of hands for the household. Which is... not very romantic. Then again, not a very romantic landscape, what with the wolves and the starvation.

After she tells Almanzo that she won't be promising to obey him, he asks her if she's a suffragette, like his sister Eliza Jane (the one Laura had issues with when she was her teacher), and Laura assures him she doesn't want to vote, but just doesn't feel like she should be making promises she knows she would not be able to keep. The undertone of that conversation to me is that he was raised surrounded by independent women, so it makes sense that hardheaded, forthright Laura would attract him.

I always wondered if Laura ever resolved those issues as time went by, because EJ (as she preferred to be called) ended up as Rose's favorite aunt whom she spent the final two years of her education with in Louisiana, since she couldn't get those final two years of high school education in the small town they lived near in Missouri.

Oh, the maple syrup, and the candy they made by drizzling the syrup on a frying pan filled with snow.

I loved those books, too. I should read re-read them at some point.

Laura is a wonderful character--she is smart, capable, jealous, impatient, brave, loyal and funny. The books are definitely worth a read.

I have many of the same good memories of the books, especially The Long Winter and Little Town on the Prairie- and a LOVED Cap Garland, so I am so sad to see he died so young. I remember Laura helping Pa with the Hay, and being happy because she did not have to wear a corset, and in the Long Winter, them making logs out of hay and straw, and grinding the seed wheat that Almanzo and Royal hid so they had bread and mush. And a snowball fight with cap Garland, which was unladylike!

The thing about the past that confuses me is that it seems from boooks and such that there was no gradual change from being a child to being an adult. Just Boom! You are a lady!