Free Land

I found this book excellent. While it contained a great number of similarities in the characters and the story line to those in the Little House Books, the story was still a great read. You were never sure how it was going to end, as the story wound around and you were left wondering whether two of the characters would end up together or not. The writing brought to life the people, the land and the hardships experienced by those who settled the mid west. Excellent, and will read again.

Rose Wilder Lane describes the character and thoughts of a man consumed with a passion for living and an intense desire to gain control over his environment and independence from his immediate society. She does so in stages, and in gradually increasing intensity, throughout the body of this work, reaching to a climax of revelation in what the meaning of pioneering truly was. Lane's hero, David Beaton, is a self-made man with ethics of pride and personal responsibilty, but pragmatic enough to recognize that he isn't like his father, who scraped the majority of his years out on a small sections of tough, tree-clogged land. His father bought his home and family life with blood, sweat, and tears, always refusing to accept debt and charity; struggling, holding onto tenacious individualism to be able to look around him and claim ownership of everything he had accomplished. David, on the other hand, sees the chance to accelerate his life, not by any less of a dose of hard work, but by taking on risk out on the Dakota praires during the claim rush of the 1880's. By his disciplined saving and hard work as a young man, David acquires enough money to apply for his own claim and betting his wits, muscles, and guts against the high chance that a wheat crop will fail. His father disapproves, but David's determination carries him with his new bride, the beautiful Mary Lathrop, out to Dakota Territory, several hundred miles west to begin his life on his own terms. The conflict with his father, who instilled in him his own values, inflames David's battles with insecurity, and forces him to draw out from within himself his desires and address who he really is and what he really wants. Lane's tale shows the struggles of a young man carving out his place in the universe, accepting his tools, but not accepting his environment as master over him. There is a constant pressure and urgency to Lane's hero, as he constantly realizes that this is "his" life and he must not just survive, but conquer all that rises up before him. Finnancial troubles, merciless weather, despair, and loneliness are constant challenges to David's pride and hope for the future. Lane paints her hero as a man fueled and motivated by something deep inside himself -- a confidence of the way things OUGHT to be -- and sometimes solely by his belief that his blessings require him to press on, an ironic thought for the modern-day, jaded, GAP-clad urban warrior in search of insurance policies and "meaning" to a life filled with sitcoms, cell phones, Myspace, personalized Ipods, and Hollywood's to-buy list for disposable incomes. What Lane achieves is to reveal economic reality--that the core of why we have what we have, and what has been lost in the blurring, hazy success of our first world economy; is that the indomitable human spirit must be tapped to survive. Only stress, and the ability to manage it and the mind, not comfort, being the reverse of mass-marketing's mantra, is the bui

Having been a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder since I was a girl, I was eager to read this book when I came across it in my local library. What a find! In Free Land you get a first hand look at what the settlers of the prairie lived through. Some of the stories in this book are similar to the ones in the Little House series (especially Shores of Silver Lake, I believe), but they are written for an adult audience with more detail. After reading this book I felt I had visited the treeless praire of the late 19th century. I think any grown Little House fan would enjoy this book. After reading it I now see why many beleive Lane co-authored, not just assisted her mother in writing the Little House books.

I have to disagree with the reviewer who said Rose was not capable of writing longer fiction; that basically she should have stuck with short stories! FREE LAND is a fine novel that disproves those theories. Taking some of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder's, memories, and making a novel out of them, does not make Rose Wilder Lane a lesser writer. It makes her imaginative and creative! Haven't many famous authors taken stories from their family's past and created great fiction? Having read this novel and "Let the Hurricane Roar", I found both to be excellent, hard-to-put-down books. These novels are as worthy to be on the same shelf as any of the "Little House" books. But really, you can't compare the two writers (although everyone always does). They both have distinct styles. I recommend FREE LAND very highly, and hope that other readers will explore Rose Wilder Lane's fiction. Also recommended: A LITTLE HOUSE SAMPLER, which contains two short stories of Rose Wilder Lane's that are superb.

Free Land was written well before Laura wrote her books. If you have read any of the biographies about Laura, many of these stories will be familiar. Rose took stories that she heard her parents tell about when they were growing up, and she spun them into a fiction based on fact story that most will enjoy. I have read that she consulted with both her mother and her father over this book about conditions, prices and numberous other things to provide accuarate as well as entertaining information.