A Prairie Year Book

The year begins with hockey, icefishing, and a snowmobile race. Spring brings renewal: the arrival of piglets, baby chicks in the farm kitchen; and outside, the fields are seeded. In summer, there’s a dinosaur park to be visited; a calf is groomed for the fair and wheat tested between grandfather’s fingers. In fall, a farm auction becomes a party, trick-or-treating is done by pick-up truck, and Clydesdales are driven by teams competing at the world’s great farm fair.

The glorious year ends with the arrival of Santa on the main street at night in a pickup truck, while beyond in the dark is the infinite mystery of the prairies.

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-The creators of A Prairie Alphabet (Tundra, 1992) now capture the rural lifestyle shared by people in Saskatchewan and Alberta, providing a month-by-month anecdotal record of life on the plains, accompanied by a series of full-page paintings. As in the previous book, Moore's artwork is the best part. Her style borders on primitive: the images are ``frozen,'' and they often seem to float above the surfaces on which they stand. Still, the details and colors are exceptional. Bannatyne-Cugnet's text is quite weak, with leaps in voice from first person, to third to second; and she uses heavily colloquial language throughout. A lack of consistency in verb tenses also tends to be a problem. Some of the anecdotes are much longer than others, resulting in a number of pages filled with nothing but print. It's difficult to determine an audience for this book. Readers who wish to absorb something of the culture and lifestyle of Canada's prairie people would do better with David Bouchard's If You're Not from the Prairie (Raincoat Bks., 1993). While that book is more poetic and less factual, it has an easier flow and leaves readers with a sense of having ``been there.''-Lucinda Lockwood, Thomas Haney Secondary School, Maple Ridge, BC