These books have been a blast to read. How I wish I could be as innovative and self-sufficient as they were back then! To be able to just build your own solid house is incredible, not to even mention all of life’s other requirements!

In this third installment to the Little House series the Ingalls family packs up and heads west toward Kansas. This journey brings adventure but also multiple dangers along the way. This book was definitely my least favorite yet. I personally didn't like the events that were happening with the Native Americans and also some of the dangers the family faced. I understand the time period, but this was just not as enjoyable as the first book. I even found it weird at times. However, it was written w...

A honey-covered lullaby of a book! Yum! Slurp! Racism never went down so good! Beautifully written, and read aloud by a champ -- but Whoa, Bessie! -- even the characters express a smidgen of ambivalence about wresting land from the natives. "Won't the Indians be mad, Pa?" And what's with the child wanting her father to steal a Native American baby for her?

I recently read this to my young son, and he couldn't get enough. He's a kid who loves nothing more than to spend all day in the woods building forts, so perhaps it's not surprising that he took to this book. It's a marvelous adventure story that left me in awe of the sheer indefatigable competence of this family. The relationship of the family to the natural world--the great prairie that they move to--is fascinating, as is their relationship to the Indians. Then again, "fascinating" did, on a r...

“There's no great loss without some small gain.” If only we lived and loved in Laura's time...I get hugely nostalgic for every time I read the Little House books. One of my favorite aspects about this series is that Wilder writes these novels in such a way that I feel like I lived through them."In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man coul...

The Laura Ingalls Wilder series is a classic, but this particular book must be chosen with care if reading aloud to young children. It contains a few pages that are quite derogatory to Native Americans. Even though this may have been acceptable at the time of writing, the reader must be ready to explain this to youngsters, or don't read it aloud to them.Overall, this was my least favorite book in this series! I almost wished Ma took a cast iron frying pan to Charles's head for all the danger he ...

This is not really a review of the general contents and themes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, but more my personal take and attitude towards the fact that this book has been (and like so many others) repeatedly challenged and even at times banned/censored (mostly due to the way Native Americans are depicted and the attitudes shown towards them).And yes, there are indeed some rather major issues with Little House on the Prairie, and especially the attitudes presented towar...

I have mixed feelings about this book. My mother read the Laura Ingalls books with me when I was a little girl, and I'm rereading them for the first time in 30 years. "Little House on the Prairie" is the story of the Ingalls family -- Pa and Ma, Laura, her sister Mary and her baby sister Carrie -- taking a covered wagon all the way from Wisconsin to Kansas at about 1870. The author is vague on the timing, such as exactly what year it was or how old she was, but it seems to be written from the pe...

I bought the CD of this story for my 4 year old daughter and have spent many days listening to it in the car with her.This book should clearly be renamed "Pa's follies" as the entire story is about him bumbling from one misadventure to the next....1. Pa leads the family across a frozen lake Peppin. The very next morning the family hears the ice on the lake start to crack and break up. By the luck of one day the Ingalls family is spared a frozen death.2. Pa nearly drowns the entire family crossin...

Okay, it's a great American classic, I realize that. I read it for the first time in third grade because the pioneer-go-forth-and-push-westward philosophy is a central feature in the proud American mindset and heritage. But it's for that very reason that the value of the book needs to be questioned.While much of the story focuses on a family's self-reliance on the Kansas prairie, the book preceding it - Little House in the Big Woods - does the same with the exception that the Ingalls family was ...