Prairie Born

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

A Hollywood actor once advised, “Never co-star with a kid or dog.”
If that philosophy could be applied to picture books, the advice to
authors might be, “Never work with an illustrator whose paintings are
going to blow your words off the page.” Such is the case in Prairie
Born, where Peter Shostak brilliantly illustrates the simple pleasures
of rural life. Most of his human subjects are young and they are usually
engaged in carefree sports or the occasional farm chore. It does not
matter if you were not born on the prairies or if you have never even
visited there; Shostak’s realistic paintings will have you yearning
for the big sky and wide-open spaces.

Trying to compete with that is a nostalgic poem by Dave Bouchard. Like
Shostak’s paintings, Bouchard’s verse addresses a simpler rural
lifestyle. The words are set in rhyming couplets—“And the prairie
continues to live in my heart, / It’s much more than memories that
tell me apart. / It’s the wind and the sun, the cold and the snow. /
Only things that a child of the prairie will know”—that are
competent, but hardly memorable. This is a splendid book where the
illustrator steals the show. Highly recommended.