I’ve had a few over the years, openings that just throw you into the story and you forget you are reading. . War of the Worlds - No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely… David Copperfield - Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Others.
When I was a child, I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books. She happened to be an answer on Jeopardy the other day, and just for nostaglia I ordered the hardcover illustrated edition.
Here is the opening of which I speak-
A long time ago, when all of the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.
They were going to the Indian country.
What child, or 5 or 7 or 12, would not have their imagination sparked, nay, set on fire by that? Any child of that age would know intuitively that their grandparents weren’t always that old, but probably never pictured them at their age. Or not being born yet. And the family leaving their home and leaving it lonely, never to be seen again, on a great adventure, this is like a combination of Robert Louis Stevenson and Hemingway, with Ingall’s sparse writing style.
Of couse you would write that way in a children’s book, some of it reads like the Tip and MItten books I read in first grade. But ya know, the Nick Adams stories by Hemingway read very similar.
I bought this to re-read as if I were a child, and while I’ve only read the first couple of chapters, am enjoying it as as adult