Maria Chapdelaine

Lisa Arsenault is an elementary-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

This is a retelling of the famous French-Canadian novel of the same
name.

Maria lives with her family on a farm in the backwoods of Quebec where
the work is constant and hard. She is of marriageable age and has
several suitors. She chooses Franзois, who works at a lumber camp
during the winter but returns in the spring. While he is away, Maria
carries on with the usual work of the pioneer woman and dreams of
Franзois in her rare moments of relaxation. On New Year’s Day,
however, word comes that Franзois was lost in a blizzard when he was
walking home for Christmas.

After a period of mourning, Maria is courted by a local boy, Eutrope,
and by Lorenzo, the nephew of a neighbour who has done well in the
United States. Since she loves neither of them in the way that she loved
Franзois, she must weigh the pros and cons of each one on a practical
level.

Stylistically primitive full-colour illustrations accompany the text.
They have the visual effect of Communist working-man propaganda posters
from the 1950s. The people in the illustrations project a sense of being
rooted to the ground and therefore tied to the earth—appropriate to
the rural toil that is at the heart of the novel.

It is difficult to encapsulate all the nuances and the emotional
content of a full-length novel in a child’s picture book, but this is
a good attempt. Recommended.