 The First Four Years, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Despite the title, this is the last book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The manuscript was found among her belongings after her death. It covers the early years of her marriage to Almanzo "Manly" Wilder. It's sort of hard to believe that this was sold as a children's book. It contains heartbreak after heartbreak, including the death of their 3-week-old son. (Strangely, to me at least, they never named him.) This incident is passed over as quickly as possible, and he is not mentioned again. Laura was reluctant to commit to farming, as she'd been through many hardships growing up. Almanzo talked her into trying it for three years, which stretched into four. Each time, the promise of a good crop and prosperity was ruined by one disaster or another. Both Laura and Almanzo nearly died of diptheria. She also describes a startling number of near-miss accidents with their toddler daughter, Rose, to the point where I wondered how any child survived in that era. There's an improbable-sounding incident where a group of Native men turn up at the farm, they make a show of examining items in the barn, and one asks her to "be his woman" - then she slaps him and they leave, never to return. Wilder's storytelling is always done in a matter-of-fact tone, emotions seen from a safe distance. The vocabulary is generally at an elementary school level, sometimes with expressions that probably needed no explanation in her era but do now. The Wilders had a "tree claim" that they needed to "prove up," and she seemed to assume young readers would know what that meant. Trigger warning for infant death. Popsugar Reading Challenge: Deals with postpartum. 52 Book Club Challenge: Paired prompt, fiction and nonfiction about the same person. (Will be paired with Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser.) Booklist Queen Challenge: Children's book.
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