The art work of Yvette Moore is very realistic and portrays the Prairie people, their families and lives exactly as it happens. The realism makes me feel as though I can relate to the people in the picture. I am from the Prairies of Saskatchewan, and am very proud to know that Ms. Moore has the talent to share with the rest of the world how wonderful it is to be from the Prairies.

Yvette Moore's paintings are absolutely beautiful and I am proud to say thay she is from my hometown in Saskatchewn. The detail and colour capture so much of what life was like for me on the prairie. As if the painting themselves were not enough, the text completes the experience of life on the prairies through its page-long descriptive passages. This is a great companion book to The Prairie Alphabet, done by the same two women, but more detailed in the text.

What a wonderful book to read to a child before bedtime! It reminded me of laying in the grass looking up at the stars and dreaming about things afar. The Cree legend elopes with the pursuit of your dreams, as rabbit and crane take you there.

Retells Cree legend of how Rabbit wanted to see the earth from the moon and finally gets Crane to fly him there. Crane's legs are stretched and his head is bloodied from Rabbit's hands.

This book tells three separate stories about children's experiences with death. The first tells how a boy deals with the death of his uncle. The second, how students deal with the sudden death of a classmate. The third tells of a girl who is at the bedside with her family when her grandmother dies. Each one deals with the sad feelings surrounding death, but also celebrates the life of the deceased individual. Each story ends with how the children cope and come to terms with loss. Before and after each story are poems that connect death with the celebration of life. These explain that endings and beginnings are all connected. I was particularly impressed with the sensitive way that the author deals with a child's sadness and gently shows ways of coping. She notes that the sadness may never completely go away, but that eventually it is outweighed by understanding and new forms of mastery.

The Saddest Time is a great resource to use with children that are dealing with both the potential and eventual loss of someone they care about. There are three short stories in this book. The first one deals with the loss of what appears to be a middle aged uncle, the second the unexpected and accidental death of a young child, and the third the dying and death of an older person, in this case the grandmother. The first story includes the anticipatory grief phase that the child experiences. Trying to make conversation with someone who is terminally ill. It addresses the fear associated with the possibility of losing parents. It also addresses the grief after the death, and attempts to help and comfort the family. The second story is about an accidental death of a classmate. The children in the classroom are given the opportunity to remember and discuss their feelings. They are also encouraged to send the family cards and letters, writing about special times they shared with their friend that died. The third story is about a child's grandmother who is dying and actually dies when the family is present. It discusses the feelings of sadness and anger that the child feels. It further discusses in simple terms, the funeral and the support provided to the grandfather. It also encourages the child to reminisce. Overall, this book really encorporates death as a normal part of life. The emotions experienced because of death are normalized and expected. It addresses feeling experienced. Discusses feelings and common funeral rituals as well as the support that is shared with friends and families after a loss. People, including children experience grief in their own way. This is an excellent book,as it encorporates anticipatory grief as well as the grief experienced after the death of a loved one. It also addresses three different experiences that are common in life. I feel it could help adults and children alike. This book would be great a great resource for the community and should be included in school system, public libraries. We are including this in our hospice library for our community to use.

When is a prose memoir nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry? When it is written by the talented Mr. Murphy and punctuated with poems that arise out of the narrative like crops from the earth, concentrating it into a sweet or bitter nourishment. The memoir tells how Murphy's family came to farm in the Red River Valley bordering Minnesota and North Dakota, starting with his grandfather from New York, who broke the virgin bluestem with a two-bottom plough. Full of both personal memories and the sweep of history, the narrative depicts a way of life at the mercy of drought and flood and constrained by national politics and now global economics. In this environment, strength of character is not a virtue but a given. With vivid portraits of his grandparents, parents, and neighbors, Murphy humanizes an often unforgiving landscape. It is amazing to come upon his poems-each one distilling the literal truth with acute accuracy. Anyone interested in the distinct power of poetry will want to see how prose and poetry interact. Six color woodcuts by artist Charles Beck make this book glow.

When I was young, my father farmed for a time. I had almost forgotten how it feels for one's livelyhood to be so closely tethered to the weather and economy, so much that one storm (or lack of) can throw one's life into chaos. Say it doesn't rain for a month, starting today, so you're not going to get a third of your regular salary. That's farming; very arbitrary. Set the Ploughshare Deep reminded me of how this feels.

Murphy's writing is simple, spare and excellent. He has a wry sense of humor that injects itself into his stories and poems occasionally, and an amiable voice. He also inspires incredible emotion, especially when he writes of the lives, manners and deaths of his beloved hunting dogs. An elegy for one of his dogs, Dee, broke my heart. An account of another dog's reaction to her puppy's death is equally moving. Murphy is excellent at what he does.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 29, 2001: "This book is a wonderful reference, beautifully illustrated."

These stories of the North American prairie lands provide a rich blend of generations of voices and stories of natural history and the land, blending poems, stories and essays with insights on both native peoples, geography and wildlife. The result is a multi-faceted collection which doesn't neatly fit into singular categories of natural history, geography or culture; but which embraces them all.

This is the first of Brad Fraser's plays that I have read. As soon as I read The Ugly Man I became entranced by Brad's complexity, and willingness to be different. I feel that this willingness to go againsed the social norm by producing such a controversial, yet masterful piece of work without restraints or care for what people think make it a one of a kind play. It is raw human emotion at it's best and is full of non stop suprises. The plot is eerie, and leaves you with an appetite for more. Good work Brad!

I began reading Fraser's work for a drama independent study I was dreading to do. I imediately began to become igrossed into "Ugly Man" as well as many of his plays. He writes complex, yet somehow easy to follow plots, interesting Characters with varying sides to each of them and overall, this play will leave you breathless and make you keep on wanting more.

This is a compendium of data on plants from the boreal forest which are used for food, or medicine, or in a variety of ways for handicrafts (in the ample sense of the word). It fills a growing need for ethnobotanic scripture, when much knowledge is being lost because it is «old-fashioned». The data are presented in an easy-to-use format of one species per page (more-or-less), and cover the three aspects of use already mentioned, as well as the known names in Chipewyan, Cree, English, French, Latin, Ojibwe, and Slave. Anything known about chemical properties is also included. This is truly an in-depth compilation, and shows us that there is more in the forest than moss and spruce trees (and unsuspected uses even for these).

When she is given a diary for her ninth birthday, Margaret Cora Wells, called Meg by her family and friends, expects to record her daily life in St. Louis, Missouri. But then a cholera epidemic strikes, and Meg's mother and little sister, Grace, fall ill. Having already lost two children to cholera seven years before, Meg's mother is determined not to lose another. So Meg and her seven-year-old brother, Preston, are sent to live with their aunt, uncle, and cousins in the Kansas Territory. Accustomed to a comfortable city life, Meg finds frontier living to be tough, but at the same time full of adventure. But in 1856, Kansas is a very dangerous place, where pro-slavery Border Ruffians attack northerners like Meg's family, who have come to Kansas in the hopes of making it a free state. Can Meg come up with a plan to help her family? I highly recommend this new title from the My America series.

If you are a fan of Little House books and would like to introduce very young children (ages 2-6) to Little House on the Praire, this book and its other three companions are the perfect way. The board book format is just the right size for little hands. The pictures by Renee Graef and Susan Mc Aliley are so sweet and beautiful! The text is simple but those who are just starting to read on their own will need a little help. Bedtime for Laura, with little girls in nightcaps under cozy quilts and Pa playing his fiddle, is sure to evoke sweet memories in those who have cherished the Little House collection, and teach the very young ones to fall in love with it for the first time.

Blood Relations is a play in two acts written by Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock. The play deals with the life and tribulations of Lizzie Borden. History knows that she (like OJ Simpson) was put on trial for murder and acquitted. The play tries to answer the question of "did she" or "didn't she" do it. The play begins 10 years after the murders of Lizzie's Borden's parents. She is entertaining her actress "friend" from Boston when conversations leads to the guilt or innocents of Lizzie. Lizzie tells the actress "you know me better than anyone -- you tell me." Lizzie then suggest they play a little game where the actress plays Lizzie and Lizzie will play the part of Bridget the maid (the only other person home at the time of the murders). At this time the play moves back in time (10 years, just before the murders) where the actress becomes and plays the part of Lizzie and Lizzie playing the maid. The play then moves through all the historical events and possible motives that could have lead Lizzie to commit the murders or not. The two characters do not stay with their new characters throughout the play, at time they move back and forth between their original characters, with Lizzie coaching the actress and helping here to understand Lizzie's actions, thoughts and desires. This is an outstanding play. It has some comical elements, along with its drama, it is very suspenseful and will keep you on the edge of your seat until at the very end of the play, when the to main characters go back to their original roles and the actress asks for a final time "Did you do it Lizzie, did you?" But, you will have to read it to find out the answer.