The Story of a boy named Almanzo Wilder...While Laura Ingalls grows up on the western prairie, a boy named Almanzo Wilder is living on a farm in New York State. Almanzo and his brother and sisters work at their chores from dawn until supper most days -- no matter what the weather. There is still time for fun, though, especially with the horses, which Almanzo loves more than anything.

Farmer Boy is the third book in the Laura Years series.

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Like all the Little House books, it tells us in rich details how life is like just a couple of generations ago. Reading this book, and all the Little House books for that matter, made me realize that, for all the advanced technology we have today, we are not so superior to our forebearers.

Just reading the chapter on Almanzo's mother making candles made me realize that people back then are almost totally self-sufficient. They knows how to make the 101 little things that we take for granted today just by walking into a store.

All that aside, "Farmer Boy", like all the Little House books, is a timeless classic.

15 of 16 found the following review helpful:

A gemAug 11, 2002
By LN Phillips
If I could pick one book that every 7,8, or 9 year old MUST read, it would be this one. The story of Almanzo Wilder's life growing up on a farm in New York is totally compelling to children at this age. He's just a small boy, but he's strong, capable, and shoulders so much responsibility in the day-to-day on the farm. He works hard, and like all boys, is daydreamy and wistful to be off playing rather than hauling water or chopping wood, but there's such an intensity of life this brings him that the typical media and gizmo saturated child of today is genuinely envious of Almanzo and charmed to journey with him for the year retold in Farmer Boy.

He comes from a large family, his parents very loving yet very hardworking people who expect a lot of Almanzo. Nearly everything they eat, wear, and use is produced there on the farm, and it is one of the greatest pleasures of the book that the planting and weaving and washing and building and milking and all the other countless necessaries are vividly detailed and the reader can almost taste Almanzo's favorite apples and onions or smell the sweetly dusty air of the hay barn. I think every child who has read this book is eager to go out at once and grow a pumpkin just the way Almanzo does it--Almanzo has the secret for growing the biggest pumpkins in the county. And there's no greater inspiration than Almanzo to tempt kids into adventuring with some good wholesome food. The boy's mealtime accounts are absolutely mouthwatering. And working hard from sun up to sun down, that boy could eat!

But Almanzo is restless, and not so much to be free to play all day, but to be allowed to work with his father's prize horses. His father is known have the finest horses, and he's not about to let just anybody mess with them. Horses must be handled just right, otherwise you could easily ruin them, and Almanzo's not ready to be trusted with them. The 'coming of age' for Almanzo is one of the most touching and powerful in all of children's literature.

Please - if you've a child this age who hasn't yet read or heard Farmer Boy, don't let this book pass them by. By the end of the book you have come to know and love Almanzo so well, it's a sad good-bye indeed. Reader's won't meet him again until years later, as a young man who first meets Laura Ingalls in "By the Shores of Silver Lake".

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:

Life On A 19th Century FarmMar 21, 2003

Farmer Boy
By Laura Ingalls Wilder
First published in 1933

I read the book Farmer Boy. The main character is Almonzo Wilder. The book is about his farming family in the 19th century. I enjoyed the story because it has so much detail. It shows all of the chores that they did, and all of the food that they ate.
They had to get up at the crack of dawn to do their chores. Everyone in the family did different chores. Some of their chores were sheep shearing, cow milking, feeding chickens, training the calves to plow the field, filling the ice house and making all of their food and clothes.
My favorite chapter was titled County Fair. It was about when the Wilder family went to the fair, and tried to win all sorts of ribbons. They all worked very hard to get ready to go to the fair. They grew pumpkins and make spices. Almonzo's pumpkin won the blue ribbon.
They had everything at the fair. From horses to fair games. Almonzo's father would not let him play any of the fair games because he said "never bet money on another man's game''. Everyone had a great time at the fair.
I also liked when the mother and father went away for a week. The children were on their own. The kids did not do their chores. Instead, they made candy, cake and ice cream. Lucy the pig got some candy, and her mouth got stuck closed. They did their chores at the last minute before father and mother came home.
I would recommend Farmer Boy to a person who needed to do research on the 19th century, or anyone who wanted a book for pure enjoyment. I learned how hard life would be on a farm back in the 1800's, why children disliked school, and why they always were so well behaved. ...

6 of 6 found the following review helpful:

Still fascinatingSep 28, 2009
By Elizabeth C. Jones
I've been laid up with the flu for the past week, and found myself re-reading all the "Little House" books to cheer myself up. My grandmother gave me all the books in the series in order, for every birthday and Christmas from the time I turned 7 until the Christmas just after my 10th birthday. I must have read all of them at least a dozen times over the past 40 years, but I had forgotten how much there is to marvel at and to admire in "Farmer Boy."

The book is set in 1866 and tells the story of Almanzo Wilder, Laura's future husband, the year he turned nine. He worked as hard as any man to help maintain his father's prosperous farm in upstate New York, but still managed to find time to just be a boy and to play and have fun. Compared to the Ingalls family, the Wilders were almost filthy rich but they were never idle. James Wilder may have been a gentleman farmer, but he worked as hard as any man he hired to help him run the place, and there was plenty of work to keep every member of the family busy from sunup to sundown, and none of the resources they had on the farm were wasted. The rooms of their handsome farmhouse were wallpapered; the floors covered with beautiful carpets, but those carpets were made from the wool of sheep the Wilders raised, dyed using berries and flowers the children gathered that grew in the woods, and loomed by Almanzo's mother. At one point Almanzo's father gives him a silver dollar and tells him how much work is in that one piece of money. You better believe it.

After I finished "Farmer Boy," the other night, I idly made a list of all the aspects of farm life and all the skills that the book describes in such vivid detail that you might be able to teach yourself how to do many of them, if you're handy, and stopped at 34. There are probably some I missed, so easily do these descriptions blend into the narrative. Everything from making a buggy whip to threshing wheat to sheep-shearing and making wintergreen oil to making a sled and breaking oxen is described through the eyes of a nine-year old boy who learns that hard work is a necessity but that diligence and patience are rewarded and that cleaning stables, hauling timber and baling hay are more fun than going to school. There is an old saying that the "rich man gets his ice in summer, the poor man gets his in the winter," and I think my favorite part of the book is the chapter called "Filling The Ice House," which describes the dangerous work of cutting huge blocks of ice off a frozen river and storing them in a sawdust-filled ice house. There the ice would not melt and could be used all through the summer to make ice cream, lemonade and eggnog. Living on the sun-baked prairies, Laura Ingalls probably couldn't imagine such frosty luxuries existed.

Once Laura and Almanzo came to know each other, she clearly became fascinated with his stories of his childhood, so vastly different and in its way so much more privileged than her own. That she chose to set them down alongside her memories of her own much more elemental, hardscrabble upbringing is one of the endless gifts the "Little House" stories provide for generation after generation of readers.

5 of 5 found the following review helpful:

WILDER CONTINUES HER WONDERFUL SERIESMar 05, 2006
By D. Blankenship
With this work, the author covers the childhood of her future huband. Her story telling continues to shine. Her simple prose is an absolute deight and wonder. I was first exposed to the work well over fifty years ago and still, to this day, give this book, and the others in the series, a read from time to time. I cannot think of better books to get kids interested in reading. Not only are they exposed to the work of a very skilled writer and story teller, but they get a very vivid look at life as it was several generations ago, through the eyes of a child. I cannot recommend this work and the other books in this series highly enough. Recommend to all the rest of the kids out there!

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