By; Willa Sibert CatherRated ★★★★★
I may be the only person my age on the planet who has not read this book before. For someone who loves coming of age stories and who read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's book so many times that at some point I probably had them memorized I am amazed that some how I managed to miss this one. Oh well, better late than never I always say.
This is a story of two children of very different backgrounds and situations who arrived in Nebraska at the same time just as the prairie there was just being opened up to farming. The narrator is Jim Burden, an orphan who travels from Virginia to live with his kindly Grandfather and Grandmother. The other child is his friend and neighbor Antonia Shimerda, a four-years-older young woman who is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who know next to nothing about farming.
Between them, they experience most of the range of farming frontier experiences in the early 19th century. Jim enjoys the happier, more successful side while Antonia finds herself faced with tragedies and setbacks. Yet there friendship becomes firm and is a central foundation of both lives.
During the story, you start on the farm, go into the town and finally end with both of them on the farm again . . . completing the natural cycle of planting and harvesting. The entire book rang very true to me and it is probably an accurate description of what it was like to live in a small town or the prairie in Nebraska at that time.
