Heartsong (Ceòl Cridhe)

Christine Linge is a past director of the Toronto & District Parent
Co-operative Preschool Corporation, a freelance writer, and a bookseller
specializing in children’s literature.

One of the University College of Cape Breton Press’s series of picture
books that “reflect the different cultures and languages of Cape
Breton Island,” Heartsong tells the history of a beautiful fiddle.
Starting with its beginnings in a tall spruce tree, the reader is guided
through the many steps of its painstaking and loving construction. We
come to know many generations of owners/players, as the fiddle is played
at weddings, funerals, and bedtimes. Finally, it comes into the
narrator’s care. She promises to show her young daughter how to play,
reflecting on the long history of music in Cape Breton Island—indeed,
“the hills are filled with it.”

Trottier’s prose is both graceful and poetic: the fiddle, which
“glowed like warm honey,” sang at a lively ceilidh while “the icy
night crouched outside.” MacAulay-MacKinnon’s watercolors, with
their rich tones, subtle shading, and background tartans, nicely
complement the upbeat text—smiling faces and rosy cheeks abound. A
parallel text in Gaelic graces each page in a lovely Celtic-style
typeface that is an artform in itself.

The narrator can hear at night a far-off music, “the song of the
island, the sound of home.” This heritage item is recommended to all
those seeking to understand Canada’s varied cultures.