Little House in the Big Woods

1932, 1981 HarperCollins edition
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Illustrated by Garth Williams
Little House in the Big Woods
Original and purchase price unknown
Hardcover with broken spine and marker stains
B

The Little House saga begins with Laura as a small girl of 4 going on 5, but already the recognizable heroine of the later books.  Preschooler Laura is smart, brave, and kind, particularly to animals.  She's jealous of her golden-haired goody-goody older sister Mary.  (Baby Carrie is more of a prop at this age, with Jack the dog and even Susan the cat having more memorable personalities.)  And Laura adores her parents, especially tough but sympathetic Pa, whose stories and music make the family's isolation, even in the winter, more bearable.

There's not a lot of plot or conflict in this first almost idyllic story, and I think the vocabulary is simpler than later.  This seems appropriate for Wilder's memories of her very early girlhood, but it does make the book weaker than it could be.  Still, yeah, weak Wilder is better than weak Thompson.  I was more gripped by the stories of cooking and sewing than I was by Purple Prince Randy accidentally stabbing a combinoceros.  Even though I'm one of the least handy or domestic people I know, I like how in the Little House books we're shown step by step how to make, for instance, bullets and maple candy.  And it's funny and charming to see little Laura's excitement when she first goes to town, a place that sounds smaller than Scandia Crossing, the hamlet of sixty-seven inhabitants that Carol's maid Bea comes from in Main Street. 

Garth Williams, who would've turned 100 last year, is one of my favorite illustrators, so I was tempted to leave this book for 1953, when he drew these pictures.  Gordon Campbell says, "In Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and in the Little House series...Williams['s] drawings have become inseparable from how we think of those stories."  And indeed, Williams's warm, realistic drawings of Laura's friends and family are an integral part of this series.  But I think it matters more that the book opens, "Once upon a time, sixty years ago...."  None of the books I've reread so far have mentioned the Great Depression, but I think Wilder wanted 1930s children to take inspiration from her family, who got through hard times, even if in this first book the wolf at the door is more likely to be literal and easily scared away by a gun or a dog.

I will note that Pa sings a song that has the word "darkey" in it, but racism is less of an issue here than in later books, partly because Laura doesn't really encounter much of the world outside her extended family.