The Little Bookroom

how're they gonna keep them down on the farm

The other day a friend asked me if I knew of any good books about farm life in the 1950s. It's an interesting question because, I realized as I thought, there are many great books about farm life, but they tend to be clustered around specific historical moments--and the 1950s isn't one of them. The mid-nineteenth century, the turn on the twentieth century, and the Depression years all feature prominently in books that explore rural life--all moments of historical change, whether hinged on internal migration, technological innovation, or climate change and disaster. And there are great books that evoke the relative timelessness of farm life, the way that it is of necessity tied into the seasonal year.

One of my favorites for children in the early years of school is Georgia Graham's The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona, partly because she's writing about the prairies that I know. I've mentioned it before, but realy must do so again, I love it so. In it, Matthew is helping his dad fix a fence before the cows get loose when he notices a funnel cloud forming behind him. Hand in hand, the two of them run for a culvert, taking shelter in a drainpipe while the tornado rages around them. The family is safe, but faced with the sudden destruction of their careful labors--and with the quiet arrival of their neighbors from adjacent farms, who set to work to repair the damage and restore order. 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 dogged persistence of these farmers, their determination to prevail in the face of disaster, their dignity amidst near defeat is powerfully evoked here, and communicates something profoundly true about the strength of those who understand their vulnerability. This is a fantastic book for kids who are ready to go beyond the charm of the farmyard to the challenges of that life, and to understand the debt that urban dwellers owe those who live on the land.

Georgia Graham, The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona (Calgary: Northern Lights Books for Children, 1998).

sense of place

Dippers. By Barbara Nichol. Illustrated by Barry Moser. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1997.

This is a beautiful, strange, and atmospheric fiction, narrated as the fragments of a letter. It tells of the heat wave of the summer of 1912, when the dippers came up from the Don River into the neighborhoods of Toronto, the same summer the narrator’s sister fell ill with polio. The story is richly evocative of this mysterious moment when the dippers and the polio coincided, collided, and canceled each other out somehow. Barry Moser’s stunning, subtle illustrations bring the dippers to remarkable life, their heavy furry bodies and leathery wings entirely believable.

whether the weather be cold...

The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona.

By Georgia Graham. Calgary: Northern Lights Books for Children, 1998.

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.