Grab A Prairie As Wide As The Sea: The Immigrant Diary Of Ivy Weatherall (Dear Canada) Articulated By Sarah Ellis Viewable As Hardcover

Sarah Ellis does of course in A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall also detail many of the problems immigrating can cause and create and yes, even if one is moving to a country where there actually is not supposed to be a socalled language barrier, since Ivy and her family are moving from England to Canada inbecause there are fewer and fewer acceptable job opportunities and prospects in post WWI England, I also and equally do very much appreciate that Sarah Ellis has Ivys imagined journal entries not be a continuous litany of doom and gloom, that A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall presents a nicely balanced combination of positives and negatives, and yes, that many of Ivys fictional musings are actually often quite hopeful and even imbued with a delightful sense of humour and totally age appropriate as well, as most appreciatively, Ivys Diary voice feels like that of a tween girl and not like Sarah Ellis masquerading as a young diarist.


And no, A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall is also NEVER just absolute optimism and positivity either since Ivy does experience language based cultural shock as she discovers that many typically British words either do not exist in Canadian English or have entirely different meanings, that there is a definite and palpable undercurrent of animosity towards the British ins Saskatchewan and that

the uncle with whom the Weatheralls are supposed to be living does not in fact own a ranch but is barely scraping by, even necessitating Ivy's father and brother to have to take menial jobs in order for them to help pay the uncle's many unpaid debts.
But unlike those immigration stories that tend to just focus on portraying problems and misery, Sarah Ellis has her Ivy Weatherall also and even in my opinion mostly present her fictional journal entries as something inherently optimistic, with both curiosity and interest regarding the family's new life on the Canadian prairies and with the negatives also never being depicted as something insurmountable but as obstacles that can and should be embraced and dealt with.


And yes, the only reason why my rating for A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall is three and not yet four is that I personally do think the story that Ivy tells in her diary about her best friend Elizabeth Muller's brother Gerhard and him running away from home to become a musician is kind of allowed to just fizzle out and to not go anywhere in other words, I would definitely have wanted a bit more information about Gerhard and that there suddenly are no more diary entries about the Mullers at the end of A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall, this does feel a bit annoying, as though the thread has just been allowed to completely disappear, as even in the epilogue, none of the Mullers are mentioned by Sarah Ellis.
But this little personal annoyance notwithstanding, I do still highly recommend A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall as both a delightful instalment in the Dear Canada series and yes also as an immigration to North America, to Canada account that does not dwell too much on the terrible and on the negative.
Even Canadian English is sometimes different, . . Gundula points out the episode about buying 'cotton, ' I am back on “kid row” with a wonderful “diary” that gives us a yearin the life of a tweenage English emigrant to the farming land of Canada,

At the start of this book we find the Weatherall family already packed and on their way to the ship that will take them from England to Canada.
We see everything: family, friends, occasions, tragedies, and triumphs through the eyes ofyear old, Ivys diary entries,

“Im thinking of the story of the country mouse and the city mouse, I used to be the city mouse, . . I knew about the Underground, and feeding pennies in the meter for the gas and where the mummies are in the British Museum, But now Im a country mouse and I know about milking and churning and chickens, ”

But that knowledge doesnt come from owning a farm, The Weatheralls are betting that the advertisements are right and that they can find a better life in southern Manitoba and get that farm of their own, Their skill sets dont quite match what rural Manitoba needs but they are all willing to learn,

Sarah Ellis is very talented in putting us in the Ivys world, We come to understand this time and place in Canada, We learn how the language is different and challenging from the English of England, There are other differences, from manners to celebrations, But Ivys observations are downtoearth and entertaining, as well as enlightening,

“The Weatherall family just got eight times bigger, Fifty chickens have arrived. ”

“Woke up to the sound of the cock crowing, Whoever thought cocks said cock a doodle do More like a rusty hinge on a door ending with the sound of somebody being strangled, ”

Its the many little touches in the authentic voice that Ellis gives us that makes it all work,
“Mr. Burgess gave William the bottom of a big tin of peanut butter, It was a bit dried up and he couldnt sell it, But if you mix it with syrup it is just fine, Mother and Dad dont like peanut butter, They think it too strangeWhich is fine with me because I love it, On bread, toast and my finger, Almost as good as doughnuts and pumpkin pie, ”

There are plenty of similarities with comparable life ins America, but there are differences as well,


This book is part of the Dear Canada series of young girl diaries, There is a comparable set for the USA,
Its May, Eleven year old Ivy Weatherall is an English girl growing up in London, Her family is one of the thousands that decide to make their way to The Canadian Frontier, They settle in the small town of Milorie, Saskatchewan in hopes of prospering on their Uncle Alf's ranch, But they find themselves living in a sod house that they can barely fit in, and paying off their uncle's debts, Until they get a house on their own, Ivy soon makes friends with a girl named Elizabeth Muller, She and Her brothers William and Harry and a sister Gladys learn to be like Canadians and go to the school house, Thats when Mr. and Mrs. Weatherall decide to start a hotel in town, Ivy is furios, and she will not leave her horse Dot, It turns out to be the better when she befriends Mr, Ambrose, a guest at the hotel, For a while Ivy and Elizabeth have a friendship dispute because of Nyla Muir, Ivy's accidentprone personality get her in trouble when she breaks her mother's wrist, Then a baby is born and Ivy finally gets to show her mother her gifts,
The book was amazing, one of the best Dear Canada books in the series, It wasn't boring at all, The only little thing that bothered me was that Ivy kept feeling sorry for herself when things didn't go her way, Other than that, Amazing. Recomend it to all of your friends, Ivy Weatherall, of London, England, is excited about her family's new adventure moving to the Canadian prairie, The brochures make Canada sound like the promised land! While things are not quite what the Weatheralls expected, they take up their new lives and learn to adapt, Ivy learns many new things: new skills, new slang, new holiday traditions and that not everyone is welcoming to immigrants, Over the nextmonths, Ivy chronicles her new life as a Canadian girl in her diary,

This book doesn't really have a central hook in the plot it's more a series of small, ordinary events, At times it resembles Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, right down to a decision Ivy's parents make for the family's future, Ivy is unaware of that since the Little House books had not yet been published, The story was pretty easy to put down and pick up again,

Ivy is a fun heroine, She's easy going, cheerful and enjoys her new adventure, I kept waiting for some angst but there isn't much, I liked how she was part of such a close knit family, She found her younger siblings annoying at times and occasionally longed for someone else's parents, she recognized how close her family was and that was important to her, That made a nice change from the drama of the last Dear Canada book I read, I also really liked her mischievous friend Elizabeth, The two of them get into some scrapes and sometimes they fight but they're true friends, Ivy's brother William is her closest friend, He's a kind brother and a nice young man, I felt bad for him for what he experienced in the story, The younger children, Gladys and Harry, were typical annoying little siblings, I didn't find them cute or entertaining,

There isn't a bad entry into the Dear Canada series from what I've read so far but this isn't the best of the bunch, It's not as deep or as exciting as some of the others, my grandma got my hooked on the "dear Canada" series when I was younger and this book was my favorite, Ivy was so sweet and her story was so relatable and my grandma was very smart to make me read novels that also taught me about Canadian history, Not even going to lie, to this day, I leaned more about Canadian history from these books than any of my history classes in school, And they were way more entertaining,