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On the Banks of Plum Creek
On the Banks of Plum Creek
On the Banks of Plum Creek
Audiobook6 hours

On the Banks of Plum Creek

Written by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Narrated by Cherry Jones

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

Based on the real-life adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek is the fourth book in the award-winning Little House series, which has captivated generations of readers.

The adventures of Laura Ingalls and her family continue as they leave their little house on the prairie and travel in their covered wagon to Minnesota. They settle into a house made of sod on the banks of beautiful Plum Creek. Soon Pa builds them a sturdier house, with real glass windows and a hinged door. Laura and Mary go to school, help with the chores around the house, and fish in the creek. Pa’s fiddle lulls them all to sleep at the end of the day. But then disaster strikes—on top of a terrible blizzard, a grasshopper infestation devours their wheat crop. Now the family must work harder than ever to overcome these challenges.

The nine books in the timeless Little House series tell the story of Laura’s real childhood as an American pioneer, and are cherished by readers of all generations. They offer a unique glimpse into life on the American frontier, and tell the heartwarming, unforgettable story of a loving family sticking together through thick and thin.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateFeb 7, 2017
ISBN9780060754228
Author

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America’s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America’s quintessential pioneer story.

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Reviews for On the Banks of Plum Creek

Rating: 4.252892385674931 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

1,815 ratings56 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I❤️this book !!! Don’t they have a baby though??❤️❤️❤️???it’s so fun
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I enjoyed Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, but I really felt like Wilder hit her stride in this book. The foreshadowing was brilliant (feeding the grasshopper a blade of grass a little more so than the constant vocal worries about borrowing against the wheat crop, which were a little heavy handed), and I think the characters really became more three-dimensional in this book. There was less of the "here's how we did things back then" and more of just the story and the family and how they weathered the hardships together.

    And man, were there hardships. If I ever actually do move to a cabin in the woods, it will not be in western Minnesota.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lovely book that I read years ago as a child. Now my daughter has read it as well and also loved it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great reading!! I like the fiddle music too. Excellent quality
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Love the book but the audio was so inconsistent and kept cutting out.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love this book. I didn't like the narrator. Her voice is odd and she reads extremely slowly.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was adventurous, and I really liked it! It has horses and blue bows, and I like that there’s kids my age in the book. I’m ready for the next one! (Dictated by 8yr old girl, written by Mama.)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It was so detailed and like I was in the book
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a wonderful reading! The way her voices changes for each character is wonderful!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Delightful tale of the Ingalls family in Minnesota. Especially good describing the plague of locusts and the great snow storm. This is a re-read after 50+ years and it was just as good now as it was then.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved it it was very good I like the Loris series play sink a good
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Read aloud to the boys.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Delightful tale of the Ingalls family in Minnesota. Especially good describing the plague of locusts and the great snow storm. This is a re-read after 50+ years and it was just as good now as it was then.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book follows Laura Ingalls and her family after their return north from Indian Territory to Minnesota. It mixes the focus on simplicity of lifestyle found in "Little House on the Big Woods" with the more socially aware nature of "Little House on the Prairie." While not as historically charged as "Prairie" was, the emotional impact in this book is still there, with the family struggling through hard economic times. The description of the plague of grasshoppers in this book alone makes it worth reading, as it is so vivid and impossible for a modern audience to imagine that it would seem unbelievable if this weren't based on a true story. This book also introduces the infamous Nellie Oleson character known so well from the "Little House on the Prairie" television series. It is a pleasant follow-up to the "Prairie" book, continuing in the deliciously readable narrative style of that work.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Cherry Jones is phenomenal--what a wonderful performance of this classic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another good book in the series, with the older girls finally attending school and meeting the selfish Nellie. Plans for a great wheat crop don't work out and an awful days-long blizzard ends the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I think I am getting into these now. Maybe it is because Laura is older and so has more detailed memories to draw on? Or maybe it is because they were somewhere with more other people to interact with? Or perhaps it is just that I am more numbed to prairie life than I was at the start, and instead of hitting ‘this is terrible’ I just hit ‘oh yes, another disaster that almost kills them all and leaves them destitute, but Laura has a nice fur muff.’Ps continues to be infuriating. He is so full of love and charm and cleverness, singing and playing his fiddle, crafting things for the farm out of nothing. But really! ‘Yes, I will give you my entire farm for that wagon and two ponies’ ‘yay, great!’? It was foreshadowed very heavily by the author (‘yes, of course we can buy an entire new house on credit, living in a dugout is tedious, and we’ll be rich come the wheat harvest!’), but even without that it would hardly have been a great surprise that they are living somewhere where farming is Just A Bit Doomed. Ah, Pa.They are nearer a town now, so we see Laura and Mary going to church and school. It was interesting to realise that even their contemporary Americans thought they were living a hard and miserable life - the town gets sent the equivalent of Christmas shoeboxes, by missionaries, for the ‘poor people’.Laura is a bit less angelic with a bit more personality in this one. In fact, to my modern ears ‘this child is slightly greedy and snobbish, so it’s ok to trick her into getting covered in leeches’ is a bit awful! I think this is the first time I’ve been keen to get to the next one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This one for me will always be The One With the Grasshoppers.

    Said grasshoppers destroy the Ingalls’ wheat crop and smother their farm like a Biblical visitation. Worse, they stay. And lay millions of eggs.

    Then one day they start marching on the ground, robotically, toward the west, finally taking their bows without so much as a by your leave.

    Another bit that stamps itself in memory is the prairie fire that brings the “wheels of fire”, or burning tumbleweeds, that also beset the Ingalls home.

    “On the Banks of Plum Creek” recounts hardships like the fires in “Little House On the Prairie” and the blizzards in “The Long Winter”, but it’s funnier than those books. This is never more so than when Pa comes out of his den within shouting distance of the house; also when the girls bring in too much firewood; and when Laura, having attended church, stops feeling wickedness for Nellie Oleson and feels merely a “little bit of mean gladness”.

    The book also has the child-eye perspective that is so prominent in “Little House On Big Woods”. But in that book Laura saw things that, though they were brand new to her, she could at least name, like a lake, or a town. In this book she’s constantly seeing things she has no name for, as when she first sees a belfry (“a tiny room with no walls and nothing in it”), or a rug carpet (the “whole floor was covered with some kind of heavy cloth that felt rough under Laura’s bare feet”).

    And a blackboard, chalk and eraser: "On the wall behind Teacher’s desk there was a smooth space of boards painted black. Under it was a little trough. Some kind of short, white sticks lay in the trough, and a block of wood with a woolly bit of sheepskin pulled tightly around it and nailed down. Laura wondered what those things were."

    All of this would have been ruined if the adult author, leaving the child’s perspective, had named these things before Laura could work them out herself.

    The book is constantly playing like this with perspective. We are never told what something is until we’re shown what it looked like to Laura – whether it’s the leeches that she finds on her legs after taking a swim, or the burning, spinning tumbleweeds, or that visiting swarm of locusts: "The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm."

    I read the last 170 pages of this book in one day, and I’m a slow reader.

    One of the most enjoyable, and startling, reads I can remember.

    This book has a few unique stamps on it, and I could have dubbed it The One With Walnut Grove; or The One With the Hobbit Hole; or The One Where Pa Hibernates Like a Bear.

    But nothing beats those grasshoppers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The characters from the TV show "Little House on the Prairie" start to show up in this book. The Ingalls have moved to Minnesota and are living in a sod house, that is, a house carved into the hillside beside Plum Creek. Pa begins to build a two-story house with prepared materials (unlike the little house in the big wood or the little house on the prairie in which all the wood and material he used he chopped down and carved himself). The only problem is he bought it all on credit, expecting a big harvest. Then the locusts came... (Watch the movie "Days of Heaven" to see what that is like)The older girls, Mary and Laura, begin going to town for school and dealing with the spoiled, bratty Nellie Oleson, whose father owns the store. We begin to see Laura's personality bloom into someone who is not just a sweet, obedient child. She has a temper, can become annoyed, envious, even disobedient. The forces of nature play a huge part in this book and gives the modern reader an idea of just how precarious life was back then.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finished reading this book to my kids at night - we usually read a chapter each night. I really identified with this book as a kid, and I could feel the old perceptions and memories as I read it. Winters always seemed colder to me as a kid because I read this book. I remember when we had a lot of snow one winter and there were big drifts out in our backyard. I would go and dig in the drifts and that linked me with parts of this story. Also, tumbleweed and grasshoppers, which were a small part of my childhood (I was paid money for each tumbleweed sprout I pulled and each grasshopper I eliminated from the garden).

    The constant struggle against everyday life in this story was a bit of an echo for me, with the recession in the early 80's and our move to a new home (making new friends, encountering new things).

    I think for this reason this is my favorite book of the series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Laura's family moves to an underground house in Minnesota before building a fine wooden house. Mr. Ingalls gets everything to build his house on credit, because he knows his wheat crop will be so good when he harvests, but a grasshopper swarm settles in the area and eats absolutely everything that grows. Pa has to leave to find work elsewhere while Mrs. Ingalls, Laura and her sisters manage on their own until he returns. Best in the series yet. There was a real story (which put it ahead of the first two books) and there were no Native Americans, so there were no nasty remarks about the "awful Indians" that marred "Little House on the Prairie."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this for the "A Western" part of my 2019 reading challenge. It has always been one of my favorite series, I love the whole family, from Martha to Rose.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Each book in the series is a blend of sweet moments and heartbreak. For every Christmas morning filled with joy, there is a blizzard, leeches, wild fires, or a plague of grasshoppers. The things they survived are incredible. Yet despite the traumatic events in their lives, it’s often the relatable moments that are the most memorable. Going to school for the first time, longing for a fur cape on the church Christmas tree, snobby Nellie who picks on Laura, a small child who takes Laura‘s doll Charlotte, etc. You feel like you are experiencing each moment along side the Ingalls family.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My favourite so far (I'm reading in order) as the books move from the feeling of Pioneer How-To Manual into the realm of actual novel. It's still a series of incidents, but they connect to form a plot (we saw glimmerings of this in the last book, but not at all in the first two, to my mind). As Laura ages we get more deft characterization touches, and the sentence-crafting has improved, with masterful descriptive passages. A real charmer.

    (Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Once again, the Ingalls family are on the move, and this time they end up in Minnesota! Being close to a town, they get to church and the girls go to school! They also start their time there living in a dugout next to Plum Creek. It's a good story, again with lots of information about how to do things during these pioneer days. And if it wasn't for the dang grasshoppers, this would have been a super success for the family! One thing I've noticed in these books so far, it always seems to be Christmas time! Not a complaint, just something funny I've noticed as we've gone along. Will it continue in book #5? We'll see soon!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the 4th Little House book, following Laura Ingalls-Wilder and her family, they have just arrived in Minnesota, where they trade a few of their things with a Norwegian farmer for his land and sod house, built right in to the hill. The girls go to school and church for the first time. The Ingalls family has to deal with drought and grasshoppers on their farm, as well as winter prairie blizzards. This is where many of the characters from the tv show are from; we meet Nellie Oleson in this book. One of my favourite chapters was their first Christmas tree at the church. These books are so very good at descriptions: the descriptions of the farm, the sky, the weather, the grasshoppers, the blizzards… These books are just really enjoyable!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    How different the Ingall's Christmas were. Can you imagine a child today being happy because they got 6 pieces of candy. Or canned oysters.They had so little, but the appreciated it more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hmm.

    It starts out problematic. Norwegians are clean people."

    "In Wisconsin we lived among Swedes and Germans. In Indian Territory we lived among the Indians. Now here in Minnesota all the neighbors are Norwegian. They're good neighbors too. But I guess our kinds of folk are pretty scarce."

    And this idea of taming the prairie without knowing anything about it - and nobody would tell them that Grasshopper Weather meant that planting a crop would be a waste of energy & time.

    And Caroline changed the name of the milch cow from Wreath of Roses (for her markings) to Spot. In all the books, iirc, she comes across as awfully conservative. She strongly discourages Laura's imagination, in at least one of the others.

    However, she does allow the girls some freedom. Laura is growing up strong & fearless, so that's good.

    I did appreciate, both now and when I was a child, the family's courage and persistence. Even if it was misguided.

    And I appreciate the wealth of detail. I'd forgotten just how much there was - a reader really gets to know what the prairie is like, what living in a dugout on the banks of a creek, and then building a house, and huddling in it from grasshoppers and from blizzards, is like.

    I think that attention of detail, as well as the character & citizenship lessons, was what earned this the Newbery Honor.
    ----------------------------------------------------------

    So, why did Pa sacrifice his boots for a 'frivolous' church bell? I'll have to re-read this and see if I can manage to empathize. Thanks Ibis3!

    Answer - because the Reverend Alden is a good and persuasive man, and because (accd to the Ingalls) faith & community are more important than comfort. *I* think the boots, since the old ones were so worn out, were more important in this case, but since faith & prayer were key to the settlers' survival, I can sympathize with Pa's choice. That's an example of one of the lessons that probably appealed to the Newbery committee."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Book on CD performed by Cherry Jones

    Book four in the “Little House” series finds the Ingalls family in Minnesota after their failed attempt to homestead in Indian Territory. They trade their horses to a bachelor Norwegian farmer who wants to head West, and settle into the sod house he’s built near the Banks of Plum Creek. Seven-year-old Laura will go to school for the first time in this location and the family’s relative proximity to town will help see them through a tough year. This book also introduces the spoiled Nellie Oleson.

    As is typical of Wilder’s novels, based on her own early life, the story is full of the innocent adventures of childhood – playing along the creek, exploring the prairie, meeting new friends in a new school. It also clearly depicts the hardship and dangers of pioneer life – wildfire, thunderstorms, blizzards and a creek that can be an inviting place to play one day and a raging torrent ready to drown a young child the next. But the Ingalls family is blessed with a great deal of love and good parents who instill valuable life lessons on their young children.

    Cherry Jones is wonderful performing these books on audio. She is so expressive in conveying the excitement of a new place to explore, the joy of a small gift of candy, the fear and anxiety of being left alone as a storm approaches, and the love of a family who feels safe when they are together. Listen with your children or grandchildren; and if you haven’t any, listen on your own.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Ingalls family moves from Kansas to Minnesota, into a sod hut cut into the side of a hill. Pa builds a clean new house with the help of a bachelor neighbor), going into debt for the materials, but his first wheat crop is eaten out by grasshoppers, and he has to move away to work. Ma and the girls learn how to manage on their own, but the hardships are mitigated by the beauty of the homestead and their love for each other.Whether all of this happened to Laura's family or not, she once more "stands in" for the experiences of many of the pioneers caught short by their ignorance of the cycles of nature in a new land.I started reading the "Little House" books because of my daughter-in-law's love for them, and because she was reading them to my grand-children. I somehow skipped that phase in my own youth, as my reading was not exactly "age appropriate" after about the 2nd grade, going pretty directly from Dr. Seuss & Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to Robert Heinlein & Co. I actually think I am enjoying them more now than I would have then, with some knowledge of history and raising a family, and a greater appreciation for Laura's writing style, which consists of non-nonsense narrative, sometimes blunt descriptions of harrowing events, a firm remembrance of what little girls are like, and a lyrical descriptive facility that conveys her love for the beauty of the landscape and animals that made her childhood joyful despite its tribulations.