If You're Not from the Prairie...

by David Bouchard, Henry Ripplinger (Illustrator)

Overview

If You're Not From The Prairie is a poetic tribute that invites readers to experience the blazing light, cutting wind, endless sky, piercing cold, and extraordinary beauty of the prairie.

The Prairie is a land of extremes and, as the lyrical text and illustrations make clear, one that inspires extreme devotion from its hardy inhabitants.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780689801037
Publisher:	Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	04/01/1995
Edition description:	Us ed.
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	313,993
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

David Bouchard is an author and former high school principal.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 2-6-Blazing skies in bright blues bounce from the full-page acrylic illustrations that face every page of poetic text in this piece about modern-day life on the prairie. Ripplinger's paintings are done in a realistic style somewhat similar to Andrew Wyeth's. In them, a young boy and his dog play through every season on farmlands, prairie fields, and country roads. He and his friends have a snowball fight in front of a large country house and board the school bus in a winter blizzard. The child walks in a creek bed in solitude and down the road beside his dad. For the most part, the accompanying verse is well written. The dialogue style works well rhythmically and makes for a possible story hour or program read-aloud. Adults would also enjoy this nostalgic piece that ends with the boy a grown farmer: ``You see, my hair's mostly wind,/My eyes filled with grit,/My skin's red or brown,/My lips chapped and split.'' With its attractive format, this will make a nice additional purchase for poetry collections, though in prairie areas it might be a ``must.''-Susannah Price, Boise Public Library, ID

School Library Journal

nger for reading aloud. The initial premise of the poem--if you're not from the prairie, you can't understand wind, cold, grasses", and such--mellows out by the end as "you" and "I" agree to understand each other because we share the same sun. The colorful acrylic paintings, however, draw you in immediately rather than insist that you can't understand. Ripplinger's images catch the vastness of prairie living, with a strong sense of the flat expanses of the horizon, and the vastness of the sky. This is a world of children on the prairie, physically lying on the land, playing in the mud, walking through the snow. The book affectionately shows farm life on flatland, wherever the land is.

Mary Harris Veeder