Prairie Born

In the follow-up to the 1994 bestseller, If You're Not from the Prairie, award-winning author David Bouchard has teamed up with well-known artist Peter Shostak to once again explore in verse and image the prairie experience that is so cherished in the memories of countless North Americans. Both in text and image, Prairie Born focuses on the passing of the seasons and their effect on the people and the landscape. This is a book that will stir warm memories for all those prairie born scattered across the continent.

Grade 2-5AA series of vignettes, in rhymed quatrains, that recall incidents of childhood throughout a year on the prairieAharvesting logs in the winter, playing with bugs in the summer, biking across the land, and dealing with the mud in spring. The narrator describes a less industrialized time, a lifestyle less connected to the outside world and therefore more innocent, more idyllic. While the poetry is competent, it sometimes strains for the rhyme and meter. The stunning full-page paintings focus on the wideness of sky and landscape and the changes that come with the passing seasons. Shostak uses a painterly style to emphasize the broadness and vastness of the prairie; the children that appear in most of the pictures are only tiny figures dwarfed by the dramatic backdrops. There are occasions when the artwork and the text on the facing page do not quite belong togetherAthe poetry is not about the picture. Because of the focus of the paintings and the removed tone of the verse, this work is more about an adult recalling a childhood past than a child's actual experiences. It's a lovely picture book, but its audience is unclear.ARuth K. MacDonald, Bay Path College, Longmeadow, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.