Book Review: Angelique: Buffalo Hunt

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Angelique: Buffalo Hunt

By Cora Taylor

Penguin Books

85 pages (sc)

$7.99

Angelique Dumas, 10, lives with her family near Batoche in northern Saskatchewan.

When we meet her in the spring of 1865 she has joined the family in the twice-yearly buffalo hunt. This year she will be playing an active part.

She is now old enough to join the other children who follow the hunters and look for the markers thrown next to the fallen buffalo. It will be Angelique's job to find her father's marker and let her mother know which animal to butcher and prepare for their family.

Angelique is excited at her new, important role, but that excitement is mixed with other emotions-worry over whether she will do well at this new job, and a feeling of apprehension. A dream she's had about coming face-to-face with a buffalo, wounded but not yet dead, comes creeping into her mind over and over again.

She knows the dangers of the hunt. Horses and hunters are sometimes killed. She worries about her father, and of Michif, her father's new horse, a buffalo runner she named herself and has come to love.

Angelique's story is set in a time when the buffalo, which once covered the Prairie as far as the eye could see, are growing more and more scarce, which puts pressure on everyone involved to make sure the hunt is a good one.

Through her experience on the hunt, Angelique learns an important lesson about responsibility, and about the serious consequences that come when responsibility is taken too lightly.

Angelique: Buffalo Hunt is part of the Our Canadian Girl series of books, works of historical fiction that set their young heroines in different times and places within Canadian history. The books allow readers to look at what life and events in history might have been like through the eyes of a young girl.

There are 12 books in the series, which deal with large disasters that rocked the country, as well as crises on a more personal level.

Not only can readers go on a buffalo hunt and learn about Metis culture with Angelique, they can live through a smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885 through the eyes of Marie-Claire, and experience the Halifax explosion of 1917 through the eyes of Penelope. They can also learn about what life in northern Nova Scotia might have been like in the late 1700s for 10-year-old Rachel after escaping from slavery in South Carolina, or see how Emily's outlook on life changes when she befriends a Chinese immigrant in Victoria in the late 1800s.

For young readers who want to go beyond just reading the books in the series, Our Canadian Girl also has a Web site where fans of the books can find out about the award-winning authors of the series.

Angelique author Cora Taylor, who grew up in Saskatchewan, has a number of literary honors to her name. She won the Canada Council Children's Literature Prize in 1985 and the CLA Book of the Year in 1986 for her book Julie. In 1988 she won the Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award for The Doll, and won the CLA Book of the Year for Children in 1995 for Summer of the Mad Monk.

The Web site-www.ourcanadiangirl.ca-also has an activities page where fans of the books can learn to make bannock like the kind Angelique makes in Buffalo Hunt, along with other activities linked to the other books in the series.

Review by Cheryl Petten