Prairie Summer

by Bonnie Geisert, Arthur Geisert (Illustrator)

Rachel, ten, is having a hard time growing up on her family’s farm in South Dakota. She hates all of the hard work, and she’s scared by the wild Montana Angus cattle. Still, she works hard to do her share of the chores and to help her dad, but no matter how she tries to please him, he always seems to think she’s worthless. Set in the 1950s, Prairie Summer provides a glimpse into the adventures and dangers faced in every day farm life.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

113 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2002

About the author

Bonnie Geisert grew up on a farm near Cresbard, South Dakota, and her childhood adventures there inspired many of the events in her Prairie trilogy. Ms.Geisert now lives in a small town in northern Illinois, where she still revels in beautiful prairie winters.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on and hearkening back to the author's own family and childhood (1950s rural South Dakota, to be exact) and lavishly, realistically illustrated with wonderfully detailed black and white accompanying pictorial images by her husband Arthur Geisert, Bonnie Geisert's Prairie Summer is readable, relatable, approachable, with a delightfully strong and continuously engaging sense of both time and place, a true and very much personally appreciated and enjoyable so-called slice of rural mid 20th century American prairie life (with the engaging and always realistically depicted and portrayed main narrator, ten year old Rachel Johnson, indeed and in fact obviously based on Bonnie Geisert, in other words that young Rachel is most definitely the representation of the author's childhood self).

But while I have for a certainty absolutely loved loved loved Prairie Summer, I do have to admit that the story has also hit very much and at times even perhaps overmuch too close to home for me on a personal and emotional level. For to be honest, almost all of the many sad and frustrating scenarios and run ins that Rachel so often experiences with her constantly critical and yes indeed at times very much in my opinion nastily verbally offensive and disparaging father, including his frustrating tendency to generally only react to his daughter and to verbally engage with his daughter if and when Rachel has made a mistake or rather when her father feels and believes that Rachel has made a mistake (with the father in Rachel's presence actually calling her worthless around cattle being the disgusting icing on the cake), well, all of this reminds me rather strongly and intensely of my own family and especially of my father, and that reading Prairie Summer, whilst indeed a very rewarding, educational and enlightening perusal experience, has also often if not even mostly been a rather painful and personally uncomfortable scenario as well (albeit that I am also unfailingly glad to have had the chance and opportunity to read Prairie Summer, that I do much and lastingly appreciate the strong realism of farming and family life as it is portrayed by the author, by Bonnie Geisert, including sibling rivalries, nastiness and even the father's tendency towards constant verbal criticism and derogatory belittling tirades, as I do understand and even enjoy that Bonnie Geistert is being realistic in and with Prairie Summer, that she is showing and telling us what her rural farm-based childhood was like, even if that means outing her own nearest and dearest, and especially her father as not always being all that verbally supportive, encouraging and indeed showing him as occasionally very much judgemental and massively stinging and hurtful with his words, his attitudes and his wilful lack of understanding of especially his ten year old daughter Rachel, who would rather read than do chores on the farm and who is also clumsy and sometimes prone to making unintentional mistakes, although she is always definitely trying her hardest and her best).

Highly recommended, but with the in my opinion quite necessary caveat that Prairie Summer does most certainly show some if not actually quite many instances of verbal and emotional neglect and family disrespect (and while I am definitely thrilled and happy that at the end of Prairie Summer, after Rachel has saved both her mother's and her newly born baby brother's lives when she drives her mother to the hospital when she goes into premature labour on the farm and only Rachel is present and available, her father finally does admit to his friends that he is proud of his daughter, that he his proud of his girls, I do kind of wish that he had said this to Rachel herself and first hand and not second hand, as while Rachel does state she indeed now realises and understands that even with his short temper and fuse her father is proud of his daughters and does not consider her worthless, I do personally still resent the fact that he does not actually say this to Rachel, but to others, to his friends, and that Rachel overheard him saying how proud he is of her and her sisters, well, that was and is pretty much a happy and lucky coincidence).

[Jennifer Heise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ten year old Rachel is the youngest of three sisters on her family's farm in the midwest in the 1950s. Like her sisters, she is expected to keep up with chores, drive tractors, help herd recalcitrant cattle. But she often is afraid of the cattle or can't keep up. This really, really, bugs her dad, who comes down hard on her for her failings. But when push comes to shove, can Rachel come through in a family crisis, and if she does, will her dad notice?

First of all, this is historically solid (I was doing most of the same things at 10 on a farm in NY state in the 1970s), and the work and the struggles to do the work well Rachel experiences are well-portrayed.
However, the whole thing with her dad really bugs me, especially since there's no explanation of why he behaves this way and when he admits she did a big thing and he's proud of her, it's only behind her back. So, yeah, zero points for that. But a good depiction of how girl kids before the liberation era still helped on their families' mid 20th century farms, so points for that.

It gave me nostalgia of the bittersweet kind. I'd give it to my mom to read but then she'd get all apologetic about what we were expected to do on the farm when I was a kid.