Tracks and Traces of Prairie Places

Grace Bavington is a freelance writer in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

This collection of 10 stories is aptly named because each story is
strongly situated in an actual prairie place. The sense of place is
enhanced by Real Berard’s fascinating illustrations. Each illustration
preceding the stories incorporates a map as well as graphics appropriate
to the narrative.

Many of the stories concern the mysterious interface between Native
peoples and Europeans; life and death; reality and fiction; loss and
faith; and animals, the land and humans. The stories tell of the
harshness and cruelty of the environment and of one ethnic group toward
another; they also tell of trust and beauty and justice.

The book’s large-print format makes the short tales easy to read;
however, the collection would have benefited from more copyediting. The
other difficulty with the collection is the scanty identification of
sources. The back cover calls the book a “pot-pour-ri [sic] of short
stories and legends drawn from life, both past and present.” It would
have been helpful to the reader and respectful of the origins to explain
the sources of each tale in the body of the text. Nevertheless, the
collection is important and the seemingly homely stories, which gain
intensity with familiarity, reflect the complexity of human interaction
and the power of place.