A Prairie Year

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Readers who enjoyed Moore’s and Bannatyne-Cugnet’s initial
collaboration, A Prairie Alphabet, will be delighted to see that the
pair have teamed up again to produce another book about this region of
Canada. However, readers need to be cautioned that, despite the
similarities in the books’ outward appearances, Year is not a repeat
of Alphabet. Whereas the latter’s 26 full-page “alphabet letter”
illustrations were all accompanied by a single line of text, in A
Prairie Year, in addition to a “caption” beneath Moore’s 12
“month” paintings, Bannatyne-Cugnet has also produced one to two
pages of two-column “story” text. Commencing with January, each of
Bannatyne-Cugnet’s stories presents a child character, equally
distributed between males and females, to illustrate what a prairie
child (especially a rural one) might typically be found doing during
that particular month. For instance, May sees Leah looking for a
planting shortcut while helping her grandparents seed their vegetable
garden, and February finds Craig participating in a snowmobile poker
derby. Moore’s detailed, realistic full-page paintings faithfully
capture the prairie landscape and its people, especially extended
families. Younger children, whose attention span would not last through
the longer story text, could be read the paintings’ brief captions and
then invited to “read” for themselves the stories caught in
Moore’s “freeze-frame” style of illustration. A brief glossary
explains terms, such as “pitchfork fondue” and “pierogi,” that
may be unfamiliar to nonprairie dwellers. Highly recommended.