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This book is an oreo of memoir and local history sandwiching a novella. It’s wonderful at evoking place and space, and I love Stegner’s musings on a landscape imprinting itself on a child between 8 and 12, and forever shaping that child’s worldview.

Published in the mid-50s, this book is remembrance of Stegner’s time growing up on the border of Saskatchewan and Montana, and his later dive into the colonial history of the area. I also grew up where prairie meets hills, and I think he’s right. I didn’t live anywhere else until I did my undergraduate in Halifax. Even though I love the city, I really missed the wide open spaces and high, blue skies of the prairie.

Though a lot of this book really rang true to me, and a lot of his analyses (like the way that small towns force bookish people to either bend or leave) still ring true, some of his discussion of Indigenous peoples is definitely of a different time. Though he’s generally admiring of the people that lived in the area, and wishes that he had learned some of their history instead of the history of the British Empire in school, there’s a lot of noble savage rhetoric.

This is a wonderful exploration of a time and place in Canada that is often overlooked, and the combination of memoir, history and fiction is a novel way to evoke time and place. I’d definitely recommend picking this up.