The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona.
Weather looms large in Canadian books, even for the youngest of children. The coming of the rain, an early frost, and in this book, a tornado, serve as reminders of the power of nature. Matthew is helping his dad fix a fence on their farm before the cows get loose, when he notices a funnel forming just behind them. They run for a culvert, taking shelter in a drainpipe, while the tornado slices through power lines, pulling out telephone poles, and tearing the doors off the new barn. The family is faced with the wreckage of their farm—and with the arrival of their neighbors, who set to work to repair the damage and restore order. Georgia Graham’s bold and detailed prints have the heightened clarity of the prairie, where every blade of grass, every stalk of wheat seems to register itself individually on the eye. “Nobody could stop a tornado, not even his dad,” but the persistence of the farming community, the dignity of those who make their livings and put food on our tables in the face of potential ruin is starkly evoked here.
Want more? Look for Marilynn Reynolds’s Belle’s Journey, about a girl caught in a blizzard with her pony on her way home from her piano lesson; W.D. Valgardson’s Thor (published in the United States as Winter Rescue), about a boy and his grandfather who come upon a man who has fallen through the ice; or, on a more comic note, Lois Simmie’s Mister Got to Go, the true story of a stray cat that made his way into Vancouver’s Sylvia Hotel from the rain, and stayed and stayed and stayed.
