29. Farmer Boy. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Illustrated by Garth Williams. 1933. 372 pages. [Source: Library] [3 stars, audiobook, children's classic, historical fiction]
First sentence: It was January in northern New York State,
sixty-seven years ago. Snow lay deep everywhere. It loaded the bare
limbs of oaks and maples and beeches, it bent the green boughs of cedars
and spruces down into the drifts. Billows of snow covered the fields
and the snow fences.
Premise/plot: Farmer Boy is the second
book (technically) in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
(The first book is Little House in the Big Woods). The book
(fictionally) chronicles Almanzo Wilder's childhood. (Presumably based
on stories he told his wife through the years.) I believe it covers
roughly one year of his life. It begins and ends in (different)
winter(s). The focus, as you can imagine, is on his farm life. He spends
a lot of time with horses, cows, pigs, and various crops like corn,
wheat, pumpkins, etc. There's also a chapter on cutting ice. (I couldn't
help but think of Almanzo hauling ice in the television show).
My
thoughts: I must have read the original series a dozen times growing
up. And I did always enjoy Almanzo entering the story in The Long
Winter. But I never read the second book. Never. I just didn't see the
appeal. It was about a boy, a farm boy, a boy who spent way too much
time with livestock and crops.
Was I right to skip it? Probably. It is all subjective, I know.
Plenty of girls--plenty of kids--go through a horse phase, where they
read anything/everything with horses. That never happened to me. I never
went through a horse phase. And this book is only about a step above
watching grass grow. In my opinion.
I do think it provided a
window into the past. And in some ways, two windows into the past.
Readers can get a glimpse into Almanzo's childhood. (If my math serves,
roughly 1866/1867). But readers also get a glimpse into the 1930s.
People certainly viewed the world different in 1866 than they do
now...and same with the early 1930s. You can't expect today's values and
viewpoints to be present in a book written in 1933...especially when
that book was telling the story of a boy growing up in the 1860s.
ETA: This was my first time to reread Farmer Boy. Technically, I listened on audio. I still don't love it. But it does have some of the same vibes as Little House in the Big Woods.
© 2026 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
