Book Reviews: These Happy Golden Years

This one is possibly my favourite of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.   It's the book in which Laura leaves home to be a teacher for the first time, starts spending more time with Almanzo, and at the end of the book Laura and Almanzo get married.   It's a very sweet and old-fashioned courtship.   They have their first kiss only after they get engaged.   But what makes Laura such a likeable character is how she doesn't just fall into his arms.   She resists his advances for months, and when she thinks he prefers someone else she gets angry and tells him to sod off, rather than dissolving into tears.   She's so feisty!   The first few chapters are truly painful to read too.   When Laura is stuck staying with a highly unpleasant woman and she feels so trapped and homesick we feel her despair.   It's great writing.  

What always strikes me about these books is how different everything was back then.   Laura becomes a teacher even though she really doesn't want to, to please her mother.   The idea that my mother would tell me what job to do is very alien to me.   As is Laura's becoming a schoolteacher at fifteen, and teaching pupils older than herself.   Mad.   These books have taught me so much about the past, and Laura is possibly one of my favourite book characters ever.   And it's even better than she was real.

Book Reviews: Little Town on the Prairie

Another Laura Ingalls Wilder book.   They're semi-autobiographical books about life growing up as a pioneer girl.  This one is just as good as the previous ones.   It's more joyful than The Long Winter.   In stark contrast to the books like On the Banks of Plum Creek this one sees Laura beginning to spend a lot more time in town, socialising with other people.   And it's good to see out heroine having some fun.   A lot of the focus of this book is on the family trying to get together enough money to send Laura's sister Mary to college.   Laura gets a job in town sewing shirts to help raise money, and sees things she's never seen before, like drunkeness.   It's odd to think how taboo it was for a respectable young girl to get a job back then.   And of course there's the start of the great romance with Almanzo.   Not that Laura really knows what's going on at the time. All in all, despite it being a very different type of book to the earlier ones, this book is still just as charming and engaging and I would highly recommend it.  

  

Book Reviews: The Long Winter

To continue on with my Laura Ingalls Wilder theme, I have also re-read The Long Winter.   Another amazing book about the life of a pioneer girl.   This is the first one not be set in a new location, as De Smet, where By the Shores of Silver Lake was set, was where the family stopped moving.   As the book opens the family are settled in their claim shanty and it's late summer.   They get warnings about the winter to come being very long and hard, and sure enough, the first blizzard arrives in October.   The townsfolk batten down the hatches, but the blizzards go on and on.   They are underprepared for winter and the trains can't through with coal.   The family get by by burning hay, twisted tightly into sticks, and by eating stored potatoes and bread made from flour ground in the coffee mill.   Eventually though, wheat runs low and the situation becomes desperate.   Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland decide to try and help.   There's a rumour that somewhere in the area a farmsteader has wheat.   Almanzo and Cap set out, miraculously find him and persuade him to part with some of it, and save the day.   Eventually May comes and the snow melts and the trains start running again.  

Once again, another great book from Laura Ingalls Wilder.   The hardship they came through was amazing.   As usual, the human ingenuity is amazing, and the way they kept their spirits up was so inspiring, not to mention Almanzo and Cap's heroism.   The kindness and love within the family is so nice too.   A really good read.  

Books

As previously mentioned I like to re-read old childhood favorites.  I've been working my way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and the latest one was By the Shores of Silver Lake.   I really enjoyed re-reading this.   I love her writing style with its little, intimate details, and I'm always so impressed by the ingenuity, self-sufficiency and determination people had back then.   In this one Laura and her family leave Plum Creek and head out West again.   When they first arrive at their destination there's nothing there.   But then the town appears, pretty much in the space of two weeks.   Amazing!   Development in action.   The wild birds and wolves leave.  How sad.   Laura also describes going to see the railroad being built.  Wow.   It's very impressive stuff.   Bit of a change going from agricultural ingenuity to industrial ingenuity.   A very enjoyable and interesting read, and a testament to the achievements of man.

Next, The English Patient, by Michael Ondaajte.  I decided to read this because I'd enjoyed the film and thought I'd enjoy the book, and I have to say that I really did.   The writing style reminds me of Louis de Bernieres, only not funny.   It's extremely beautiful in places.   It's about a young Canadian nurse, Hana, at the end of the second world war who is taking care of a mysterious patient with no identity in war torn Italy, because he's too ill to be moved.  The two of them are joined by Kip, a young Indian sapper and Caravaggio, a fellow Canadian and friend of Hana's father's.   The English patient is not all he seems, in fact he's not even English.   Gradually his story comes out and he tells the young nurse about his time spent in the Sahara desert, and the woman he loved, and how he came to be so badly burned.   Mostly I loved this book.   The story is original, and I love the writing style.   However, the end is fairly unsatisfactory, in that there isn't really a proper end, and there are a few bits of the book that I just found silly and self indulgent, such as Hana talking to Kip and then she pours milk on his arm.   What?   That's just silly.   Unless there's something deeply symbolic I'm missing here?   Or when Caravaggion commits a robbery in the nude.   Why on Earth would he do that?   Or when Hana helps Kip dismantle a mine and then decides she wants to have a nap on his chest.   Well that's not exactly realistic, is it?   There'd be far too much adrenaline for napping.   Still, despite the odd bits, it's a thought-provoking and beautiful book.

And finally, Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett.   This is the 31st book in the Discworld series, of which I am a big fan.   It's about a young girl called Polly who disguises herself as a boy so she can join the army and search for her brother.   She slowly discovers that all the other recruits in her regiment are also all women, who have disguised themselves as men and run away for various reasons.   She also discovers that her country is losing the war she believed they were winning.   Eventually, of course, her regiment is victorious, with the help of a minor goddess, and peace breaks out.  She and her fellow troops are also found out, but her Sergeant saves them from trouble by revealing that several of the military's top officials are also women in disguise.   I don't read Terry Pratchett for the plot, but more for the larger-than-life characters and the hilarious writing style, and this one didn't disappoint in that sense.   The plot was a bit dodgy in places, such as discovering a band of dead zombie generals in the basement of the fort, but the writing style was brilliant.   And I always love the little, clever touches he puts into his books, such as naming the main character Polly, and her male alter-ego Oliver (as in the song about sweet Polly Oliver), and calling the book Monstrous Regiment, as in John Knox's tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Montrous Regimen of Women.   Very clever.   Another hit from Mr. Pratchett. 

Books

As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to re-read childhood favorites every now and then.   In fact I usually pick one up whenever I go home.   Lately I've been revisiting the Laura Ingalls wilder books about her childhood as a pioneer girl.   It's fascinating reading them as an adult because you pick up on so much stuff you missed as a child.   This one was probably my favorite of the series when I was little.   It's full of sunshine and summer and wild flowers and running around barefoot.   What struck me most about this one this time around was just how independent these people were.   They did everything for themselves, from making their own clothes to building their own houses.   And how precarious life was for them, and how brave they were to chose that life.   The family almost loses everything after losing their crops to locusts two years in a row.   Their whole lives were a real life adventure and I have to say I am a tiny bit jealous.   So all in all, a lovely read for children and an eye-opening read for adults.  

Next up, Burning Bright, by Tracy Chevalier.   I would count myself as a Tracy Chevalier fan; I very much enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring, and rather enjoyed The Virgin Blue and The Lady and the Unicorn as well.   I was very eager to read this one, as it's about William Blake, who I really like.   But I have to say I don't think this one was her best.   I was quite disappointed to find that William Blake's character had relatively little screen time, and that it concentrated far more on the lives of Jem and Maggie, two children growing up in London.   For me William Blake's character just didn't make much of an impact.   There just wasn't enough poetry and mystery and fire attached to him.   He was really just a plesant father figure for the two children.   What I usually enjoy about Tracy Chevalier's writing are her unique and very evocative descriptions, but with this book she changed her writing style entirely (perhaps because it was set in England?).   In a blind taste test I wouldn't even have been able to tell it was of hers.   All in all, an alright read, but not as good as I have come to expect from Ms. Chevalier.

And finally, We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka.   This one was brilliant!   I raced through it!   I've read her previous two novels, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian and Two Caravans and loved them both, so I was eager to get stuck into this one, and it didn't disappoint!   Marina Lewycka's strong points are her amazingly larger than life characters and her ability to capture people's idiosyncrasies and style of speaking perfectly.   Her writing of English dialogue spoken by foreigners is both very funny and astoundingly convincing.   In a bit of a departure from her previous two novels, this one does not follow the lives of Ukranians, but of Jews and Palestinians.   Through the lives of her characters she tells the story of the founding of Israel and the hardships the Palestinians have suffered.   It's an emotional rollercoaster.   Just like her first novel, WWII is a major theme.   And just like her first novel, one of the main characters is a very feisty elderly person who you can't help falling in love with.   There is also a similarity with her first novel of a bad situation escalating into a huge mess there just seems to be no way out of, and in the end, against all odds, all the characters just decide to get along and make things work.   The only criticism I would offer is her glue theme.   The main character writes for a builders' magazine about adhesives, and the author tries to include glue metaphors throughout.   I'm just not very convinced they work.   They seem a bit forced.   But overall, fantastic book, just like her other two.   And just like her previous two novels, this one is hilarious!   Highly recommended!