The Long Winter

The story "The Long Winter", like all the books in the autobiographical series by American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a lesson in life: do not give up, do not lower your hands, believe and hope!

The main character, Laura, is fourteen years old. Her large family faces trials again. Cold and hunger are their main enemies. They also need a considerable sum of money for Mary, Laura's older sister, to attend college for the blind. Laura takes a job to help her sister. She has to do something she doesn't love – sewing, but she, like all the Ingalls, does not complain, she simply does what she believes is her duty.

An impressive part of the book is dedicated to the young and desperate Almanzo Wilder (Laura Ingalls's future husband), who, risking his life, in frost and blizzard, travels through deep backroads with a companion for supplies, bringing back several sacks of wheat and thereby saving Laura's family and their neighbors from imminent death.

Love and care for each other help the family overcome all difficulties. And, of course, father Charles, a man of extraordinary fortitude and strength of spirit, is capable of turning the entire world for the happiness of his beloved wife and daughters.

Thanks to the reliable descriptions of everyday life – the aroma of coffee in the mornings, pumpkin pie, milk frozen in a bucket, Christmas presents that reached the Ingalls only in May – the migratory everyday life of the family resonates and evokes in the reader a desire to compare their modern teenage coming of age with Laura's coming of age.

Recommended for family reading, as well as for middle school age adolescents, especially girls.