I read and reviewed each of the five books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. I liked them all, but Plum Creek was my favourite, I think, for the grasslands imagery. Farmer Boy would be the runner-up.

I never read these books as a kid, and I wonder sometimes what I would have thought of them if I had. I very much enjoyed the Willow Tree and Cherry Tree Farm books of Enid Blyton, which have a similar sort of nostalgic glow over what must have been a very hard life - harder in the case of Wilder's books than in Blyton's, admittedly - so I probably would have liked them just as well. As an adult, though, that nostalgia is counterbalanced by an awareness of the cost of this sort of settler colonialism. The displacement of the original people, the impoverishment of the affected ecosystems with the loss of animals such as the buffalo and the wolf... it makes them sadder reads, in a way, than they would have been if I'd read them when I were younger.