CHRISTMAS CARD COUNTRY

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 17

CHRISTMAS CARD COUNTRY

A Prairie Boy's Winter. By William Kurelek. Collins. 40 pp. Price $7.40. (Reviewed by Tui Thomas) Snow is fun to New Zealand children and something of a novelty. But in the snowbelt of Canada it brings harsh conditions that must be accepted stoically and adjusted to for five or six months of the year. William Kurelek lived on a small dairy farm in Manitoba when a boy, and in his autobiographical story he brings out the grim realities of a prairie winter. He tells how children have to help with outside chores by bringing in firewood during a blizzard, axing the ice on the cattle’s drinking troughs and chipping it off haystacks to drag out feed, when temperatures are down to 40deg. Fahrenheit below zero.

But snow can be fun for the hardy Canadians also. Kurelek has the children in his story playing ice hockey at school, ski-ing on ropes behind horse-drawn hayracks, skating and teaming up for snowball fights.

(Making snowmen is strictly for the Utile kids.) Kurelek enjoyed his childhood winters, “the eerie silence after a blizzard,” watching the ponds thaw and scanning the skies for the first birds to herald another spring. And when he went to a city high school the country boy wanted to talk out his memories, but no-one was interested until he began to say what he wanted to in pictures. They attracted so much attention that he decided to study art in England, after graduating from the University of Manitoba. His works are now in many collections throughout Canada and the United States. Twenty of his paintings, as crisp and clear as a sunny Canadian winter day, illustrate the story, which will entertain and inform young and not-so-young New Zealanders, who may still dream about living in “Christmas card" country. The author says his book is “for everyone who ever spent a winter on the prairies — and for all the others who wonder what it is like.” Such is its appeal, it has been published by three different houses since 1973.