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Schultz, Judy. Mamie's children: three generations of prairie women
Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press 1997. 248p. ISBN 0-88995-167-5 paper $14.95 (USA) $16.95 (Canada)
Schultz, a travel and food editor for the Edmonton Journal, does some things very well in the story of her grandmother Mamie, mother of eight and homesteader, in the early part of this century, on the Saskatchewan prairie, of her mother Pearl, who, in this telling seems mainly to have not been Mamie and the author, about whom we know little more than that she did not want to be a nurse, hated bean soup and as a girl fell down stairs. I want very much to forgive the book its shortcomings, the greatest being the lie of the title, for the latter two generations of women get much more superficial, almost anecdotal treatment, in comparison to Mamie. She died at 84 in 1961, a person who lived the hardest parts of two centuries, and like most grandmothers and great grandmothers of the prairie, were extraordinary exactly because their Herculean efforts to exist were shared by almost all their peers. They are extraordinary because they were not.
The first part of the book describes the early years of her marriage to a man who was frequently gone away to find work and frequently poor, her battles with fire, grasshoppers and near starvation. It is immediate, dramatic, sometimes charming, sometimes almost horrifying. After life...