 "The best of the series" | 2010-02-07 |
| - Reviewed By ppdoc from Baltimore, MD |
| While I'm sure that Laura's fans will dispute my nomination of Farmer Boy as the best of the series, it is without question my favorite. The descriptions of the family's day and the food as well as what it took to live in those times makes it my series favorite. I read these books to my children when they were small and reread them still. I reread Farmer Boy in the midst of a 3ft snowstorm yesterday and it was a perfect diversion for the day. The Americans of these stories were made of sterner stuff than we. None of the political correct silliness that we have to endure today. Children were praised for doing well and admonished (albeit with love) for failure. This should be required reading for all new age parents who blanche at correcting a child for fear of damaging his or her self esteem. I was not raised that way, nor were my children. And I believe that they are the better for it. Just like Almanzo in Farmer Boy. |
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| "Almanzo A.K.A. Farmer Boy" | 2010-02-02 |
| - Reviewed By Readin&Writin-Books |
Almanzo Wilder is a farmer, who wants to be just as hard a worker as his father is. He helps his family by working with their crops of hay, selling the potatoes, hoeing carrots, planting corn & pumpkins, and picking berries. He learns how to do everything else on the farm too, like dealing with the sheep & pigs, to training the young oxen & horses, to gathering the sap from the trees.
Almanzo also does things that other children do, like going to school, or sledding on a winter day, and sometimes he gets in trouble, whether he's in it by himself or with his older brother & sisters. There's usually something exciting going on, like the County Fair, or a holiday like Independence Day. When Mother & Father leave for a few days, what do you think the children do in their absence?
He's a hungry growing boy and it seems that the Wilder's table is always overflowing with good home-cooked food, so there's plenty, even for Almanzo's very large appetite.
"Farmer Boy" is the third book in the "Little House" series, but since Almanzo's story isn't connected to the other stories in the series, you can read this book at any time, even if you haven't read any of the other books.
A few years ago, my family read this book aloud, and I've read it again myself since then. I enjoy reading the "Little House" books, and this one is a definite favorite. I think anyone, boys or girls, would like reading this story. |
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 "One of the best Little House books" | 2010-01-13 |
| - Reviewed By CultOfStrawberry from I wait behind the wall, gnawing away at your reality |
| I read this after I read most of the other books within this series, and this one stands out as one of my favorites. Unlike Laura, Almanzo comes from a better-off family, so he's not entirely the 'farm boy' on the cover, but he's not a spoiled city kid either. It was a really fun novel to read, but like the other Little House books, it needs to be understood within its context - when these events happened, and when this book was written - but is still a great book if you like the Little House series. |
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 "don't make me read another word!" | 2009-10-31 |
| - Reviewed By Roger L. Bagula from Lakeside, Ca United States |
Except for the historical accuracy of pre-1900 farm life,
this book is just really hard to read with the baby wording
and situations that may be autobiographical, but could
be made at least readable.
I don't know exactly why I hate reading this one,
but it just turns my stomach.
Maybe it is the complete acceptance of an outmoded
set of values that would have allowed a set of bullies
to kill a school teacher in rural
New York ( and admitted by the author that the previous
school teacher died from his beating).
I don't think the values assumed in this novel
are ones that one would want to raise up in your children. |
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| "Still fascinating" | 2009-09-28 |
| - Reviewed By Elizabeth C. Jones from Chapel Hill, NC United States |
I've been laid up with the flu for the past week, and found myself re-reading all the "Little House" books to cheer myself up. My grandmother gave me all the books in the series in order, for every birthday and Christmas from the time I turned 7 until the Christmas just after my 10th birthday. I must have read all of them at least a dozen times over the past 40 years, but I had forgotten how much there is to marvel at and to admire in "Farmer Boy."
The book is set in 1866 and tells the story of Almanzo Wilder, Laura's future husband, the year he turned nine. He worked as hard as any man to help maintain his father's prosperous farm in upstate New York, but still managed to find time to just be a boy and to play and have fun. Compared to the Ingalls family, the Wilders were almost filthy rich but they were never idle. James Wilder may have been a gentleman farmer, but he worked as hard as any man he hired to help him run the place, and there was plenty of work to keep every member of the family busy from sunup to sundown, and none of the resources they had on the farm were wasted. The rooms of their handsome farmhouse were wallpapered; the floors covered with beautiful carpets, but those carpets were made from the wool of sheep the Wilders raised, dyed using berries and flowers the children gathered that grew in the woods, and loomed by Almanzo's mother. At one point Almanzo's father gives him a silver dollar and tells him how much work is in that one piece of money. You better believe it.
After I finished "Farmer Boy," the other night, I idly made a list of all the aspects of farm life and all the skills that the book describes in such vivid detail that you might be able to teach yourself how to do many of them, if you're handy, and stopped at 34. There are probably some I missed, so easily do these descriptions blend into the narrative. Everything from making a buggy whip to threshing wheat to sheep-shearing and making wintergreen oil to making a sled and breaking oxen is described through the eyes of a nine-year old boy who learns that hard work is a necessity but that diligence and patience are rewarded and that cleaning stables, hauling timber and baling hay are more fun than going to school. There is an old saying that the "rich man gets his ice in summer, the poor man gets his in the winter," and I think my favorite part of the book is the chapter called "Filling The Ice House," which describes the dangerous work of cutting huge blocks of ice off a frozen river and storing them in a sawdust-filled ice house. There the ice would not melt and could be used all through the summer to make ice cream, lemonade and eggnog. Living on the sun-baked prairies, Laura Ingalls probably couldn't imagine such frosty luxuries existed.
Once Laura and Almanzo came to know each other, she clearly became fascinated with his stories of his childhood, so vastly different and in its way so much more privileged than her own. That she chose to set them down alongside her memories of her own much more elemental, hardscrabble upbringing is one of the endless gifts the "Little House" stories provide for generation after generation of readers.
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| "book purchase" | 2009-08-20 |
| - Reviewed By An Amazon User |
| The book was just as advertised and I have enjoyed it very much. It took a little time to arrive though. |
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