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Retell,
Relate, Reflect Retell
The book that a was given was Prairie Fire. This book was about a family
that moved to the Prairie to start over. There were four people in the family
Peggy, the mother, Jamie, the son, Meg, a daughter, Kate, another daughter.
Jamie was 14, Meg was 16, Kate was 4 and the youngest was Robbie. The eldest Meg
always stood up for herself and other people getting put down.
The book starts off when this family went to the registration office to
claim free land. When they were there they were hassled about having no husband
or man to start the homestead. They were told they wouldn’t be able to do it
without a man. While in line they noticed a Metis person standing there. He was
denied land because of his race. Meg being whom she is stood up for him and was
told to stop in fear that they were also going to be denied land.
They were finally granted land. They were warned that the Metis would be
a problem and that they should stay away from them. When they arrived at their
land they started farming and building their cabin. They also started being
friends with Louis, who is a Metis. Soon after that they were having conflicts
from homesteading, with the Metis rebellion, and with natural problems like
animal and natural disasters.
Towards the end of the book they were face to face with a flash fire. The
fire was spreading really quickly and they needed to put it out before it got to
the Campbell’s farm. The metis even cam in to help out. Then they decided to
fight fire with fire. They took the harrow and put it behind the bull and
cleared down a thick circle of grass and wheat so the fire couldn’t go
anywhere and it worked. The fire was out. Now they just had to put out the odd
spark that comes flying out of the fire.
After that Meg and Louis finally decided to tell their family that they
were in love and that that they were going to get married for the middle of
October, right after the harvest. Relate For me, this story is very hard to relate too. During the reading of this book and thinking about “how can I compare this to something” I couldn’t think of anything. Then it hit me. It doesn’t have to relate exactly it can have a hidden meaning. Like the flash fire. I didn’t have a flash fire in my back yard but I have had big problems that I had to overcome as a family. Like when my sister and her husband split up. We had to stick together and help her through it, just like in the book, the family had to stick together. At the beginning of the book it showed that even back then they had racial discrimination and how it is still a problem. Human still haven’t figured out how harmful and unnecessary it is. This had an impact on me from the beginning. Reflect I think that this book needed a strong introduction to the book. It needed to grab the reader more and take him/her back into the state of mind that they were back in the time of the book. I also think that the book needed more of an ending. It needed to go into detail about how Meg and Louis’s life went after they got married. I predict that they got married they had kids and went on living their lives. The book would be a little bit better if it had a well written epilogue.
It seems to me that the title of the book didn’t really have anything to do with the bases of the book. The whole thing wasn’t based on just a prairie fire; it was more about life back in the mid 1800’s. The title of the book made you have a different perspective on the book. If it was called something like “Prairie Life” it would have made you look at the book in a whole different way. I think that the fire should have also played a bigger significance on their way of life and how hard they had to work to get their farm back to tip-top shape. And how that made their relationship with the Metis better too. |
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