The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The innkeeper’s bossy daughter irritates Rendi. Bad-tempered and insolent, Rendi hates Clear Sky, but he has no way of leaving the sad village where every night the sky moans and the moon has vanished. When a troubled runaway arrives in an isolated Chinese village where the moon has disappeared, he initiates a quest to find the missing orb and resolve his past.Įscaping from home in a merchant’s cart, Rendi’s abandoned in the Village of Clear Sky, where the innkeeper hires him as chore boy. A twenty-minute hailstorm ruins the first year's work another crop is struck by three days' hot wind and 'the grains were cooked in the milk, all dried and shrunken, absolutely shriveled.' But if that one good year evades them, there is recompense in a snug house and mutual sympathy in adding New Year's at the Wilders' to Thanksgiving at the Boasts' and Christmas at the Ingalls' in racing the ponies, sledding with Shep, the least new acquisition (once a windfall of Waverly novels) and, with little Rose sleeping or toddling close by, in plowing and haying together and seeing the stock thrive: 'It would be a fight to win out in this business of farming, but strangely she felt her spirit rising for the struggle.' The spirit as well as the format is that of the Little House (though the format will mislead those who expect a functional resemblance).

and consequently closer to the bone, to the hopes for a good harvest dashed year after year. Wilder, and then Manly (never 'Almanzo') takes hold, joking and reasoning and promising that they'll quit at the end of three years if he hasn't 'made such a success that you are willing to keep on.' Compared to its predecessors this is telegraphic, with little dialogue or development of incident one might also say less fictionalized. For a moment it's all wrong, this manuscript left unrevised by Mrs. Laura wasn't sure about marrying Manly, she'd 'always said she'd never marry a farmer'.

The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder