Storms and Scarabs
by H. R. Hobbs
Published by H. R. Hobbs Books
Review by Toby A. Welch
$15.00 ISBN 9780995344860
My first question when coming across Storms and Scarabs was: what the heck is a scarab? For those like me who were clueless, a scarab is an ancient Egyptian gem, one that was typically in the shape of a scarab beetle. As foreshadowed by the word in the title, scarabs play a vital role in this interesting fiction read.
Storms and Scarabs revolves around sixth-grade best friends, Mitch and Brock, who are thrown back in time thousands of years. They arrive in ancient Egypt via a portal to the past. Luckily they come across a man who has encountered people like them before, people who’ve “visited from the Great Beyond.” What comes next is a gripping journey involving an embalming shop, an amulet, a sarcophagus (a big stone container that holds a coffin), a Pharaoh and his family, and numerous other historical aspects. A spyglass plays a key role, almost becoming a character itself. The boys struggle to get back to modern times but I won’t ruin the ending by telling you if they make it or not – you’re welcome!
I would wager that this book is targeted for the young adult audience but I believe that anyone of any age will enjoy Storms and Scarabs. It has a powerful and ageless message at its core – your voice is important and you are seen. Another bonus – who doesn’t appreciate an entertaining read.
Hobbs did a phenomenal job of making ancient Egypt come alive for the readers. I could easily envision the people dressed in loose-fitting clothes and sandals, baskets of fruit and grains on their heads. Outdoor markets flourished. Drinking vessels were crafted from gourds and plates were made of leather. Pharaoh was the ruler. People and their items got around via carts pulled by either animals or humans. Soldiers and guards carried shields, spears, and swords. Papyrus was for writing on (traditional paper was still a far-off invention.) Hieroglyphs, an ancient form of writing that used symbols and pictures instead of words, were the language of written communication. What a fascinating time in our world’s history.
Storms and Scarabs is the first book in Hobbs’ new series, Time Chasers. That is great news for those of us who thoroughly enjoyed Storms and Scarabs and can’t wait for more. Hobbs’ last series, Breaking the Rules, had three books. Hopefully the Time Chasers series will have at least that many or more.
If you enjoy reading books like The Magic Tree House and The Time Warp Trio, grab yourself a copy of Storms and Scarabs. Every action-filled page will come to life in your hands.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>The Treasure Box
by Judith Silverthorne
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781988783888
The Treasure Box is the fourth Judith Silverthorne novel I’ve read during my decades as a book reviewer, and again, this Regina-based writer has mesmerized me. I reviewed Silverthorne’s middle years’ novel, Convictions, in 2016, and must reiterate what I wrote about that novel, as it absolutely also applies to The Treasure Box: “This is extremely competent writing, and what’s more, it’s a story that’s hard to put down.”
Silverthorne’s credible and likeable ten-year-old narrator, Augustus Ludwig (aka Gus), has just reluctantly moved from Calgary to Regina after his parents’ split. Now Gus, sister Hannah and Mom have moved in with Grandad, who is suffering from intermittent memory loss, and will soon be transitioning into a seniors’ home. It’s a lot, but there’s more. At school Gus becomes the target of “serious bonehead” Connor and his gang of “top dogs,” who mock his name and make school miserable, but their teacher, Mrs. Redmar, has given the class a family history assignment that may change everything for empathetic Gus … his curiosity about his own ancestors, his acceptance of the move, and even his thoughts about his unusual name.
Initially Gus feels that his family history will be “lame,” as Grandad’s the only relative he knows, but in the first chapter he finds himself in the attic, where “The bare dim bulb cast spooky shadows across the slope-ceilinged space” and inside a “scarred, wooden drop-leaf desk,” he uncovers a carved wooden box—the treasure box. The disparate items inside, ie: a “snippet of faded blue ribbon,” a coin, and a scrap of a map possess the ability to transport him back to World War II, and even much further back, to the 1600s. Each time he dares handle the objects in the treasure box, he is briefly but viscerally transported to life-and-death scenes involving his ancestors. But who were these people, and how were they connected to the yellowed, German baptism certificate from 1944 that only cookie-baking Mrs. Kramer (“Vhat do you vant?’”) down the street can translate?
There are numerous topical threads in this novel, and I hope the book’s incorporated into classrooms across the country. There’s multiculturalism and racism (Gus befriends Yussuf, whose family fled Syria, and First Nations’ Issac, who shares his lunch with a classmate who’s often hungry); aging; divorce; and war. The fascinating historical elements include The Thirty Years War and the Great Frost of 1709, when birds froze “like tiny marble statues” in trees and in mid-air. Silverthorne evokes both a prairie homestead (“A clump of tall aspens grew out of the foundation of the collapsing, grey-and-weathered barn”) and WW2 trenches (that “heaved with rats”) with equal success.
Though history’s a major element, the author consistently keeps us current, as well. Grandad says the war his father fought in (for the Germans) was “More real than video games,” and expressions like “No can do” and “Sounds like a plan” maintain the novel’s present feel.
And the conclusion: mastery. Congratulations, Judith Silverthorne. You’ve slayed it again.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>Towards a Prairie Atonement
by Trevor Herriot
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$22.95 ISBN 9780889779648
Award-winning writer, prairie naturalist, and birder extraordinaire—Regina’s Trevor Herriot requires little introduction. River in a Dry Land: bestseller. CBC Radio: regular. I’ve just devoured Herriot’s Towards a Prairie Atonement—an eloquent treatise on the interconnected injustices that Colonialism and profit-at-all-costs dealt the prairie Métis and all living things dependent upon the Aspen Parkland grasslands. Though compact in size, this three-part essay dispenses an enormous amount of history, appeals for a reckoning, and delivers a few slight feathers of ecological hope. Herriot says he “set [his] heart on telling a story that [would] inspire people to take a second look at what we all lost, and could yet restore, in our regard for more sophisticated and nuanced forms of land governance”.
The wisely-woven text begins with a map of the Saskatchewan and Manitoba rivers and historical sites discussed, and an edifying timeline that stretches from the 1600s to 2012. These centuries saw the beginnings of Canada’s fur trade; the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies jostling; buffalo’s demise; a plethora of government decisions that greatly impacted upon the Métis; the plight of Louis Riel; the establishment (and consequent brutal displacement) of a 250-strong Métis settlement around the Ste. Madeleine mission north of Fort Ellice; the institution of community pastures in Saskatchewan and Manitoba via the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act (the Canadian government’s response to the Dirty Thirties); and Stephen Harper’s reckless gutting of the PFRA, created in 1935 for the “protection and programming for vulnerable grassland ecosystems”.
With each of Herriot’s books, it’s not just what he says (and considering his passion, intelligence and concern, he hasmuch to say) that appeals, it’s also how he says it. Birds are never far away, and here we find the longspur’s “warm and holy” eggs in his initial paragraph, where he’s walking, as he’s done for two decades, “onto the scattered archipelago of native prairie islands surrounded by a sea of cash crops”.
His human company in this story includes fellow grassland naturalist and photographer Branimir Gjetvaj and Michif Elder Norman Fleury; Fleury provided the book’s “Afterword”. Together they walk and talk in the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture among rare birds, “small mandalas of antennaria in bloom,” and the Ste. Madeleine headstones. At this site years before, the Métis “spoke the language, sang the songs, and told the stories that their fur-trading ancestors first voiced in the prairie world”. Even now, Métis (“new people who were not this and not that,” Fleury says) families gather at the pasture’s “well-tended” campsite for a summer celebration, and indeed, the import of community and “how the prairie might bring us together” are part of what Herriot advocates. The Michif are tenacious.
Colonialism, Herriot asserts, is “an utterly unreliable narrator” and atonement begins with “recognizing and honouring what was and is native” but’s been “evicted from the land—native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures, and languages too.” I assert that Herriot’s a completely reliable narrator, and I’ll never tire of his imperative themes.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>The Legend of Sarah
by Leslie Gadallah
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Toby A. Welch
$24.95 ISBN 9781989398494
The Legend of Sarah was first published in 1988 under the title Lore Master. It has now been republished in this third edition by Shadowpaw Press Reprise based out of Regina. Myself and anyone else smart enough to grab a copy of The Legend of Sarah will be grateful that it was chosen for republication. A few minor references were changed to make them more up to date but the novel is otherwise unchanged. The Legend of Sarah is as relevant today as it was 35 years ago.
The title character is a 14-year-old who lives a rough life. Sarah survives on the streets of the fictional town of Monn, rigorously trying to avoid trouble. A storyteller she regularly encounters weaves formidable tales, unknowingly providing inspiration for Sarah to aim for a better life. But of course things are never simple. She gets caught up in the crossfire of numerous evil and negative forces that aim to muscle their way into her world, trying to pull Sarah to a darker side. Boiled down, she is trapped between two cultures.
Sarah is an interesting character. She is a tenacious young thing, working hard every day to better herself. You can’t help but root for her to make it. She is an underdog that you hope will come out on top.
I’m not sure what time period this book takes place in, or its location, or if it’s another world altogether. It is a cross between a fantasy and a science fiction read so perhaps it’s another place and time. Silver is used for currency, they use torches for lighting, and have tribe raids. One location in the book is built over an abandoned missile base. Yet they also have a cool food service where you order from a menu and a delivery service drops the food items outside your door. People travel from place to place via pods. There is talk of witches, wizards, gremlins, gnomes, and witchcraft. Mystic energies abound. The entire book is a fascinating mixture of contradictory nuances.
Gadallah was educated as a chemist and has written popular science articles and served as a technical editor. She has four science fiction novels on her resume as well as numerous short stories. With the quality of The Legend of Sarah, it wasn’t surprising to learn that she is accomplished in the writing arena.
This fictional work is 371 pages, plenty of space to give readers a fully fleshed story with well-developed characters. I highly recommend this book about the clash of cultures, one a technological ideology and the other the opposite. This is a superb example of classic yet timely Canadian science fiction.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>The Story of Me
by Denise Leduc, Illustrations by Olena Zhinchyna
Published by Lilac Arch Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$11.66 ISBN 9781778286933
Denise Leduc is a chameleon. The Aylesbury, SK writer easily changes genres, and she writes well in each of them. Perhaps you’re familiar with her children’s picture books—Poppies, Poppies Everywhere!, Letting Charlie Bow Go and In the Prairie Wind—or her titles for older readers, like Why Not Now?, My Sun-sational Summer and My Wonderful Winter. Her latest softcover is The Story of Me, a journal dedicated to her grandmother “for the memories she created with me when I was a young child”. Leduc writes that her “hope for these journals is to provide opportunities for our own reflection and for sharing between the generations”.
I can certainly get behind that. Even before reading, I decided I’d share this book with my octogenarian mother, two provinces away, in Saskatchewan. Though we speak on the phone daily, an occasional conversational prompt is welcome. As Leduc suggests, “Sometimes conversations with loved ones … can help get the memories flowing”. The Story of Me delivers forty prompts to help one “remember stories” from his or her life, and it includes several spaces for personal notes and attaching photos or other mementos. Rather than using the book as a journal, I’ll use it to interview my mother and record her responses.
The book is beautifully illustrated by Ukrainian artist—and “optimist!”—Olena Zhinchyna, beginning with the cover painting of yellow blossoms against a purple background. The journal opens with the question “What are ten things you would tell people about yourself,” and a series of lines—like a ruled notebook—appear beneath this. On the opposite page, we find another original, full-bleed floral painting.
The next several pages are headlined with questions about family names, memories and traditions; holidays; childhood treasures and friends; birthplace and travels. Many of the aforementioned questions might be easy to answer, but queries like “What would be a perfect day inside?” and “If you could be an animal for a day, what would you be? Why?” require more contemplation, and that’s where things will get even more interesting.
I appreciated the nature-based questions, including “What things do you love in nature?” and “What are some of your favourite places in nature?” Leduc doesn’t just stick to roses and butterflies, however; she also asks “What is a challenge you’ve had?” and “How did you handle this challenge?” I wonder what the question “Who have you loved?” will bring up for Mom.
The book ends on a sunny note, asking for a list of “Things I am Grateful For”. The illustrations—particularly the two evocative, wintery landscapes—may aid in contemplation as readers consider these wide-ranging questions about their experiences. Answering the prompts could take a few hours or a few weeks.
Christmas and birthdays provide wonderful opportunities to share activity books like this journal, but really, no special occasion is required to write about our own lives or to give someone our undivided attention while they speak about theirs. This book says: Go ahead. You’re important. And I’m listening.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>See You in Le Touquet: A Memoir of War and Destiny
by Romie Christie
Published by DriverWorks Ink
Review by Toby A. Welch
$24.95 ISBN 9781927570845
If any book should be made into a movie, it’s this one!
See You in Le Touquet reads like a gripping historical fiction novel but it is a true story. Retired Canadian journalist Romie Christie tells the story of her inspiring parents, Sandy and Dorothy, in this fascinating peek into their lives.
As Christie points out in the About This Story section in the back of See You in Le Touquet, this is a work of creative nonfiction. “It is based on fact, with some creativity and imagination woven into the story… Throughout this book, I have endeavoured to stay as true to actual events as I was able.” For the parts of the timeline that Christie didn’t have firsthand knowledge of, she assembled the information via personal essays Sandy had written, Le Touquet history books, Dorothy’s diaries, photos, historians, and stories from the family members and friends of her parents.
The cast of characters in See You in Le Touquet is lengthy as many people weave in and out of Dorothy and Sandy’s lives. If you struggle to remember who’s who as I did, a list of the players is near the back of the book starting on page 213. It was an invaluable help as I made my way from 1915 to 2005 and into the years after the deaths of Sandy and Dorothy.
Christie does an impressive job of interlacing her parents’ lives together. But that isn’t surprising considering that she was a journalist and producer with CBC Radio for almost two decades where she worked on bringing countless stories to life. Her experience with storytelling shines through in this triumphant work.
One of the many things that make this book so hard to put down is Christie’s ability to pull you into the story with the tiny details; they flesh out events in an intimate way that breeds familiarity. For example, the description of the obsession with jazz in Paris in the late 1930s. Heart-warming stories of Dorothy’s beloved dog, Bruce. Specifics about vehicle models, landmine placements, and the two-term Army university course at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, etc.
My favourite snippet in the book occurred when Sandy met Dorothy for the first time and thought to himself: “I’m just a boy from Saskatchewan!” And Dorothy’s thoughts thirty seconds later when she learned where he was from: “Canada! Even more exotic than America!” (Dorothy and Sandy don’t meet until two-thirds of the way through the book; that’s how engrossing their backstories are.)
Christie sums See You in Le Touquet up best in her blurb: “Theirs is a story of war, love, and peace. A story for the ages.” I give it two radiant thumbs up!
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative/acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin”
by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95 ISBN 9781778690174
It’s innovative, bilingual, and gives us another kind of Genesis. The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative/acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin is a Cree/English poetry collection by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, a Regina writer, editor and professor of Indigenous Literatures at the First Nations University of Canada. Archibald-Barber has ingeniously combined traditional Indigenous creation stories—The Star stories—with quantum physics, and the result is a star-studded collection of eye-opening poems.
The author essentially contemporizes Cree oral tradition stories (that “teach us how we are all related to Creation through the same source of energy and spirit”) by spinning them into poems that merge with the “spiritual and scientific understandings of the cosmos and the quantum foundations of reality”. He cites Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear’s talk on quantum physics and Indigenous spirituality as a major inspiration, particularly Little Bear’s discussion on “how the quantum superstrings are what Indigenous cultures have traditionally called spirit”. He also laud’s Cree educator Wilfred Buck’s video, “Legend of the Star People,” which describes the “Hole-in-the-Sky—a ‘spatial anomaly’ or a ‘wormhole’ that leads to and from the spirit world” via the help of Star Woman and Grandmother Spider. By presenting his work in English and Cree, he simultaneously also helps keep the Cree language alive.
This stunning collection’s divided into two sections: “The Star People” is the stronger of the two. It’s told within a sweat lodge’s “dome of woven willows” and contains the Creation narrative. Throughout the book the poet effectively weaves the here and now with the celestial, ie: “a sudden splash cuts the silence/rocks cracking in the cosmic hearth/the universe takes its quantum shape/fills itself with its first breath”. This first powerful poem, “Emergence,” includes: “and I crawl out through the door/a dazed child, a little spirit/dragging space-time behind me/like an old blanket”. The three-page piece introduces the “story of the stars/of the stones/of our grandfathers and grandmothers,” and in following poems we meet the Star Woman, who “dances/with a blanket made of stars” and Grandmother Spider, guardian of “the quantum door”. Star Woman “plucked a string” from “countless self-amplifying loops” and eventually “the galaxy began to fray/stars spilling out like scattered beads”. The Creator steps in and warns to respect “the threads” as they “belong to the universe and hold the sky together”.
Star Woman sees the “earth gleaming in the starlight”. She wants to go there, and does, in human form. The other Star Children, hearing her sing, soon follow, and become “the People of the Earth”.
It’s a fascinating braiding of the traditional and scientific, and some kind of magic happens as a result. The poems also touch on how “the balance was undone”: the “Paper People” arrived, the Indigenous “were barred/from walking on the open land,” and traditions were lost.
This stanza alone proves this poet’s prowess:
the busker strums a song
on the corner
where our light
cones overlap
and the strings vibrate
for a moment
as I catch your glance
from the window of a passing car.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>A Day of Feelings/A Day of Shapes and Colours
by Ashley Vercammen
Published by Home Style Teachers
Review by Sally Meadows
$15.00 ISBN 9798776175084, ISBN 9781998218004
Looking for colourful and educational books to add to your classroom, school, or home library? Check out Ashley Vercammen’s A Day of Feelings and A Day of Shapes and Colours.
Ashley may have grown up in a tiny rural hamlet, but that hasn’t stopped her from thinking big! She has a degree in International Studies from the University of Saskatchewan and has taught English to children around the world. Ashley has drawn from those experiences, along with her work with children with developmental disabilities, to create easy-to-read early reader books that focus on compassion, acceptance, and community.
A Day of Feelings is a wonderful resource for teaching about emotions and how to share one’s feelings with others in a socially appropriate way. Her inclusion of multicultural children in her illustrations and the conversational tone of the book particularly benefits students with English as an additional language, as well as children, such as those on the autism spectrum, who learn best from the simplicity and directness of social stories.
Ashley has included interactive activities in the book’s last few pages that give readers an opportunity to put into practice what they have learned. There are face templates on which to draw each feeling discussed, as well as a space to write out each feeling word. The last page includes all four feeling words neatly printed out in big letters, a help for teachers and tutors creating worksheets and classroom resources for their students.
A Day of Shapes and Colours features delightful cartoon-like characters with expressive eyes that illustrate a wide range of shapes (circle, square, hexagon, etc.) and colours (primary, secondary, and lesser known colours such as indigo). This book is a fun way for students to learn about and be reinforced in key visual art and mathematics components of the Saskatchewan curriculum.
I love hearing an author read his or her own work, and you can hear Ashley read A Day of Feelings (along with a selection of her other titles) under the “Free Content” tab on her website https://www.ashley-vercammen.ca/.
THESE BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM.
]]>Jawbone
by Meghan Greeley
Published by Radiant Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00 ISBN 9781998926008
Original. Startling. Candid. Jawbone is a quick-read novella by Newfoundland writer, performer and director Meghan Greeley that encompasses the inherent joy and terror of being alive and being in love. It’s outrageous that a book this polished is the author’s debut title.
I initially wondered what I was getting into. Greeley writes: “I was wired shut, and then a man put his latex fingers in my mouth and cut out the wires with gardening shears”. What? Plotwise, the narrator—a concertina-playing actor—is recuperating in a small cabin (she told the Airbnb owner that she was “looking for the loneliest place in the world”) after an accident left her both physically and emotionally shattered. We know her boyfriend had moved to California months earlier, and his letters are scattered throughout the text. The red-haired costumer designer the actor’d been sharing an apartment with was tantalizingly bizarre, ie: they created a list of tasks that take approximately a minute to complete, like “Microwaving a small portion of leftovers”. And the roommate—she of the “smoothest skin”—is difficult to read. Just friends? More than friends? Then there’s the climactic aquarium incident, among a crowd and before a bloom of jellyfish.
All in all, Planet Earth seems too alien to navigate and the narrator wants “to disappear,” so she decides to apply for a nonprofit-sponsored, never-return trip to Mars, and must create a minute-long video audition. Trouble is, her jaw’s been wired and speaking’s impossible. For now, there’s the cabin, where she learns that “twenty-nine showers” is “the lifespan of a bar of Irish Spring soap if you are rigorous”. For now: memories.
You can’t help but fall at least a little in love with this narrator; she bleeds insecurity, strangeness and desire across every page. Among the things that make her ache: “the smell of wet snow on pines; the last lines of television shows” and “any mention of the beaches of Normandy”. She bought a hat “that made [her] feel more like [herself] than anything ever had before”.
Though the premise sounds “out there,” the story’s completely earthy. The memorable cast is compelling, eccentric and will say (and do) almost anything, often apropos of nothing. The roommates “drank gin and put bras on [their] heads and pretended [they] were dumb men”. They played “Winter” in summer, exhaling smoke from a “half-smoked cigarette” and pretending “that the smoke was [her] breath, frosting in cold air”. Underneath the stream-of-consciousness reveries, remembered conversations, and the actor’s eclectic confessions (“My teeth felt different in California;” she “concoct[s] email passwords from the things of which [she is] most deeply ashamed”) lies a credible story of simmering attraction. Readers, you’ll feel it, too.
Looking to kick 2024 off with a fabulous read? Jawbone is a book for anyone who has ever “wanted something, something, something else”. Finally, the cover is another example of how Radiant Press is producing the most gorgeous books out there. It shimmers. And much like the text within it, it’s positively radiant.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
]]>Lost Treasure on the Circle Star Ranch
by Jackie Cameron, Illustrated by Wendi Nordell
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Sally Meadows
$19.95 ISBN 9781778690013
In Lost Treasure on the Circle Star Ranch, nine-year-old Ben stumbles across yet another mystery as readers get a glimpse of life on his family’s ranch on the Canadian prairies.
The story draws the reader in immediately with a vivid visual of two horses gallopping across the prairies, their riders-Ben and his sister Sarah-shouting about a grass fire.
Ben’s family springs into action. The appearance of a stranger in a blue truck who helps put out the fire raises Ben’s curiosity. When he learns from a Hutterite neighbour that there had been another grass fire years ago near an abandoned cabin on his family’s rented land, and that the fire might have been connected to a thief using the cabin as a hideout, Ben’s imagination goes into overdrive. Could the stolen money and jewellery still be at the cabin? And could the mysterious man in the blue truck, who Ben spots again later at the rodeo, be on the hunt for the lost treasure?
Swift Current author Jackie Cameron effectively weaves details about life on a ranch-the danger of grass fires, the value of neighbours, the kids’ participation in rodeos, the diversity of prairie wildlife, fun campfire traditions, and more-into the twists and turns of the main storyline.
I really enjoyed this story because although I didn’t grow up on the prairies, my father and his extended family did. With one cousin who still ranches and another cousin who was a national rodeo champion, this city girl got a glimpse into what life on the prairies might have been like when they were young boys, with a page-turning mystery to boot.
I hope this story inspires young readers with prairie roots-and those reading to them-to learn more about their own family history. For students who grew up in another culture, this engaging novel for kids is a wonderful way to learn about the unique lifestyle of a fundamental part of the Canadian cultural tapesty.
Author Jackie Cameron was a teacher-librarian for 25 years. She has tapped into her intimate knowledge of life on the Saskatchewan prairies-her family raised beef cattle-to write childrens’ books that educate and inform about the ranching life. The first book in her series, Adventures on the Circle Star Ranch-the author’s first ever publication-was shortlisted in the children’s book category of the 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards. This story is suitable for ages 5-8 (K-3) and is a worthy addition to a school, classroom, or home library.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM.
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