The Divide - Tapa dura

When Willa Cather was a girl, her family moved west to the open prairie of Nebraska, leaving behind a world Willa loved dearly. Gone were the wooded hills and the meadows marbled with sheep. In their place was a flat, empty land, as bare as a strip of sheet iron. Willa felt she had come to the end of things; she felt the land did not want them.

But then spring came, and the silent land stirred to life. Summer followed, long and hot, and Willa roamed free over the open fields on her pony. Slowly she began to explore the hidden delights of this strange new countryside, and to make friends with her fellow settlers on the Divide. By the time autumn came, with its splendid sunlit colors, Willa understood that what she had thought was an ending was really a new beginning.

Michael Bedard and Emily Arnold McCully evoke the spirit of the American West in this lyrical story with delicate, richly hued illustrations. They celebrate, as Willa Cather did in her novels, the wild beauty of the vast prairie she came to love and the sturdy spirit of the pioneers who made it their home.

Born and raised in Toronto, author Michael Bedard didn’t spend his youth dreaming of being an author: he was too busy enjoying being a child, exploring the lush ravines and wild haunts of the city. His easy affinity with the thoughts of children and his appetite for exploration are evident in the subjects he chooses to write on. may of his books combine his love of literature with history, introducing to young children the elusive poetess Emily Dickinson, the cool but imaginative Brontë siblings and the strong-willed author Willa Cather as a child.

He is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award (1990) and the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children (1991), both for his novel, Redwork.

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