Lizzie Skurnick, author of the recently released Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, used to write a column on Jezebel dissecting the young-adult novels we read as kids–and likely reread as adults. (Her book is based on these columns, and Farmer Boy is the Little House book that’s up for the reread here.)
Skurnick has two Little House books in her online Fine Lines arsenal: Little House in the Big Woods and The Long Winter. Unfortunately, the link to the Big Woods column is broken [UPDATE: No, it’s not! Thanks to reader Jim for supplying it], but The Long Winter, in which she draws comparisons between the book and today’s economic climate, still stands:
The Long Winter, for those of you who (shame!) never made it the entire way through the Little House series, picks up with the family when Laura is fourteen, and tells the story of an epic winter that strikes the tiny town of De Smet, South Dakota, nearly starving out all of its inhabitants. When I first picked up the book for a Fine Lines reread, I was quite sure that I’d be interested mostly in the domestic details of the Ingalls family …
Read the rest of it here.