Tales from Willowshade Farm: An Island Woman's Notebook

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Howatt, a retired schoolteacher and farmer, uses the short essay form to
share her perceptions of life on a Prince Edward Island farm. The
collection consists of 49 essays, each two to three pages in length. The
subjects of these jottings include the birds and bees, trees and
flowers, berries, seaweed, manure, bats, turkeys, geese, bugs, wasps,
licorice flavouring, osprey, smelts, and many other topics picked from
the author’s everyday life, past and present.

Howatt’s appreciation of her rural surroundings and the unique
quality of P.E.I. farm life (mainly the influence of access to the
Atlantic coast) is apparent throughout. Unfortunately, her style has a
schoolmarm correctness that is monotonous to the point of being painful
to read. Everything interests her but nothing excites her. She maintains
a Pollyanna-like approach and tone: everything is lovely. On a few
occasions, she reaches for humour but doesn’t quite pull it off. More
frequently she attempts a scholarly tone by dragging in the Greek or
Latin roots of a word. This does nothing positive for her prose style,
but rather adds a fairly heavy hint of pretentiousness.

Tales from Willowshade Farm is of limited interest outside the
author’s family, although it will stir up some memories for anyone who
has spent time on a fruit farm, especially one on the Atlantic.