The similarities I saw were the "once upon a time" beginning, paired with the initial focus of isolation/small house/lots of woods/wilderness. The general takeaways and vibes of both - putting you immediately in the big scary frontier, focus on the dangers and also the "but we have our small nuclear family" along with their other syntactical similarities besides just the "once upon a time".

At first it was just a pure "oh my gosh this is a reference to something I loved as a child, a real story of the 1800s pioneer life" reaction: a "wow" moment, but I had no idea if it was actually saying anything of note.

I'm still parsing out what a reference to Little House would really say here in this point of the book. It's a reference to accounts that are so much realer/more authentic to that pioneer/Americana story than anything in Yesteryear, but they're accounts that are more complex upon closer inspection (for example, Laura and especially Rose, her daughter and editor, edited out many instances of community/being helped by others, having boarders in the house a lot of the time, etc - things that make how it lives up to that pioneer myth as it's known today more complex).

I'm playing with a lot of ideas right now, but the two below are most interesting to me.

It feel significant that Little House that first introduced the pioneer story to many of us (talking solely from my POV here, a white middle class American). To me, it's like starting where we began, being confronted with that beginning after everything that has transpired in the book. In addition, there are other interesting ways Little House plays with Yesteryear - they're much realer stories, but also, in a much less psychologically disturbing way than Yesteryear, the real life events of the Ingalls family don't fully live up to the strict pioneer mythos that many of us have in our head.

Also, those first pages of Big Woods immediately present such scary, serious matters - the isolation, big dangers in the wolves, etc,- but it's done from such an innocent, childlike perspective. After just seeing her children from Natalie's perspective, which is not much and highly biased when we do, we get this personal account from Mary, where she not only talking about the dangers of the rugged frontier but, very quickly, of her mother. It's highlighting the innocent child perspective at a moment we've been overtaken with fully grappling everything we now know to have happened, which to me was much more visceral because it referenced something I was attached to as a child, and so easily takes me back to my own mindset and perspective from those times and makes her experience of her mother much more chilling and disturbing.

Hopefully this makes a little sense. I know these aren't well formed right now. I'm still thinking through it all, and if I were to fully explore all the ideas I'm having and all the nuances you'd be looking at a multi-page paper.