Little House in the Big Woods (Little House, #1) in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jan 11, 2021 Manybooks rated it it was ok

Shelves: childrens-literature, historical-fiction, biographies-memoirs, little-house-series, book-reviews, farming, dragging-writing-style

So yes and indeed, before I start my actual review of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods I should probably point out that I never actually did read the Little House on the Prairie series as a younger child (or have the novels read to me), and I therefore also do not have that sense of nostalgic love and appreciation many of my Goodreads friends tend to have with regard to both the Little House on the Prairie series as a work of historical and biographical fiction and to Laura I So yes and indeed, before I start my actual review of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods I should probably point out that I never actually did read the Little House on the Prairie series as a younger child (or have the novels read to me), and I therefore also do not have that sense of nostalgic love and appreciation many of my Goodreads friends tend to have with regard to both the Little House on the Prairie series as a work of historical and biographical fiction and to Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author. Because although I did watch and enjoy the television series (the one starring the late Michael Landon) every week until the last season, I in fact only started to read the actual Little House on the Prairie novels as an older adult (since by the time I started to read full length novels in English in the early 1980s, I was already a teenager and as such rather well beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author and more into writers like Judy Blume and Paula Danziger).

And while I probably would have very much adored Little House in the Big Woods had I encountered it as a child below the age eight or nine, when I finally (just a few days ago) did manage to get to perusing Little House in the Big Woods, albeit that I found the historical information and details Laura Ingalls Wilder presents regarding her early childhood in the Big Woods of Wisconsin interesting and enlightening (and indeed, I am also glad the author shows that in the 19th century, hunting and butchering animals were generally necessary in order for frontier families like the Ingalls to have sufficient food and adequate nutrition), from a personal reading pleasure point of view, I have really not all that much enjoyed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing style, finding the presented narrative of Little House in the Big Woods for the most part frustrating, annoyingly dragging and sometimes even quite tediously awkward, and indeed to such an extent, that I often became annoyingly bored with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s printed words and very much tempted to skim and to skip. For really, I truly and often just got massively frustrated with how on the surface and lacking in emotionally Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stylistics are in Little House in the Big Woods and how she regularly uses linking adverbs (as in my opinion, especially with words like “then” Laura Ingalls Wilder makes such constant use of them that I for one have indeed and certainly found Little House in the Big Woods to get totally repetitive and dragging and for this to have definitely quite negatively affected potential personal reading pleasure, and in particular for me as an older adult reader, who totally does not tend to appreciate narrative voices that feel repetitive and slow, that meander on and on and on). ...more

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