Laura and me - my first Little House book

I guess a lot of people would start at the beginning - in my own way, I am too. I'm not going to write about Laura's first book or her birthplace or even the first article she wrote for publication decades before the LH books. I'm going to write about my first LH book.

My first Little House book didn't even have LITTLE HOUSE in the title. The first Laura book I ever read was On The Banks of Plum Creek which told the story of the Ingalls family's life in Walnut Grove, Minnesota even though the town was never actually named in the book. Luckily Michael Landon came along years later and took care of that little problem.

 

That's the book right there - the actual book that I first read at age 11. I can't believe I didn't know about Laura before that. I read all the time in elementary school, my favorite books being The Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner and the Betsy books by Carolyn Hayward (not to be confused with the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace, I didn't discover those until adulthood) but I never encountered Little House until I went to my friend Kathy's house.

She had the whole series and one day she let me borrow On The Banks of Plum Creek. I'm not sure why we started with that one, maybe it was her favorite or maybe it was because it was the only hardback on the shelf. It didn't matter, I loved. loved, loved the book. The idea of living in a dugout in the ground (with a dirt floor!) was fascinating to me and, of course, this was the book that introduced Nellie Oleson, the villain of the series so there was all sorts of drama. It's an exciting book with grasshoppers, leeches, blizzards and long-legged snipes. No wonder I was hooked. I immediately decided to read the series from the beginning and I've been reading it ever since.

You may wonder how I am able to get a current picture of Kathy's book...I loved it so much, it never went back to Kathy. Oops.