Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I just read the Little House in the Big Woods and I liked it a lot. It's a true story written by Laura, a little sister with Mary, baby sister Carrie and their mother and their father, her father is a hunter. They live in a log house where "as far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month there was nothing but woods". They have cows and they have horses. I want a horse to ride through marshes and look for frogs (I don't think there was many marshes around for them to do that). It is seven miles to town and they only go once a year which I think is crazy. The kids have only gone ONCE to town in their lives!

I would like to go back in time and live then but I wouldn't like the Sundays though. "On Sundays Mary and Laura must not run or shout or be noisy in their play. Mary could not sew on her nine-patch quilt, and Laura could not knit on the tiny mittens she was making for Baby Carrie. They might look quietly at their paper dolls, but they must not make anything new for them. They were not allowed to sew on dolls clothes, not even with pins... They must sit quietly while Ma read Bible stories to them or stories about lions and tigers and white bears from Pa's big green book The Wonders of the Animal World. They might look at pictures or they might hold their rag dolls nicely and talk to them. But there was nothing else they could do."

I liked reading the stories that Pa told to Mary and Laura while he was cleaning his gun and then he played his fiddle to them while they were trying to go to sleep in their trundle bed. Pa tells Laura and Mary the story of Pa and the voice in the woods and the story of grandpa's sled and the pig.

I sped through this book because it was my favorite book I have read yet. I couldn't stop reading it. Garth Williams has made good black and white illustrations.

When I watched the TV show I was terribly disappointed how they acted. They were too dramatic compared to the book but the acting girls I pictured the same way as in the book.

Now I am reading The Little House on the Prairie which is the next book in the series. I think it is good but they are not being very nice to their dog because they are making him walk from Wisconsin to the Indian Country which is Kansas. They were not very happy when they had to move out of the big woods. They didn't like how everybody kept on moving into the woods they were living in every day. The new people were killing too many animals that the Ingalls needed to eat.

I think everybody would like this book.

by Claire Shamgochian