“I don’t see how anybody can be prepared for anything,” said Laura. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and the more thankful for your pleasures.” It always has been so, and it always will be. “If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. “This earthly life is a battle,” said Ma.
“There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.”
The harder they worked, the dirtier everything became.” Timeless, too, are moments such as Laura’s struggle to do the fall housecleaning and discovering how some projects always take six times as long as you think they will: “It was amazing, too, how dirty they all got, while cleaning a house that had seemed quite clean. It is fascinating to see how bullying has not really changed much.) Also – wow, her verse GOES VIRAL! The innocence with which the teasing starts and the anonymous rapidity with which it tears through the town is all Laura’s fault and she knows it and feels terrible about it. (I love that when she writes the mean verse about Eliza Jane she excuses herself: “She meant only to please Ida, and perhaps, just a little, to show off what she could do.” I know this feeling so well. The battles with Eliza Jane Wilder and Nellie Oleson are so frustrating and yet so satisfying, and Laura is no angel. The crowd of high school kids sledding together, jockeying for social position, experimenting with electricity, eying up each other’s clothes, the first hints at romance, Laura’s burn-out with school, are absolutely timeless. Some of the little conversations about style are wonderful – Ma is constantly, gently disapproving of Laura’s newfangled notions, and Laura does a fair bit of eye-rolling over Ma’s old-fashionedness. I’m astonished, now, at how much of the book is focused on Laura being dissatisfied with her looks and struggling to be stylish.
In many ways it’s straight-up YA, though it was published so long ago. I wish it wasn't like this: but the book was published in 1941 and is set in 1882, so we're stuck with it.Īnd for a long time, as a child, this book was my favorite of the series. I don’t think this excuses what’s going on here, but I do think it shows that A) what you read doesn’t necessarily damage you for life, and B) children are very good at blocking out the things they don’t get. They might as well have been Morris dancers or chimney sweeps. I neither knew nor would have understood what they were supposed to be. Clearly they were men making music and singing, their faces disguised with black polish. As a child, living in Jamaica, sharing homes with Jamaican families and running in a pack with Jamaican kids, I actually didn’t know what the “darkies” of this chapter were supposed to be. The minstrel show in the chapter “The Madcap Days” appals me as an adult. I kind of don’t know how to deal with the casual racism in these books.
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