In this good-natured, easygoing memoir, thirtysomething writer Warren Cariou looks back on his rural boyhood in northern Saskatchewan and attempts to capture the ineffable magic of a childhood home. Cariou’s account is leavened by charming anecdotes of family and rural life and an honest attempt to describe the darker aspects of small-town living. The book is marred, though, by a narrative voice that rarely strays from the tone of a cheerful tour guide.

Lake of the Prairies opens with Cariou’s quest to define where he comes from – a farm near Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan – and includes the equally important imaginative landscape, the kitchen-table stories that create the myths of his family and their local world. With careful brushstrokes, Cariou outlines the “blood magnet” of his family ties, and the mythic stature of his storytelling father. Cariou also adds his own self-portrait of the artist as a dirt-bike-riding young man.

Cariou’s no motorbike rebel, though. Even when describing uglier aspects of life in a small town, such as death threats against his father, a local lawyer, Cariou remains on his best behaviour. Throughout the book, Cariou’s tone is a little too even-handed, rarely veering from the book’s folksy, horse-drawn pace.

More unsettling is Cariou’s transformation from tour guide to apologist when discussing racism in rural life. Rightly, Cariou doesn’t shy away from connecting the ostracized youth of a native acquaintance, Clayton Matchee, to Matchee’s later army career and his role in the infamous torture and death of a Somali teenager. But when Cariou learns of his own Metis ancestry (a fact his mother’s family had suppressed), his ambivalent reaction – “we are still largely incapable of understanding and accepting hybridity here” – displays a startling lack of curiosity about native culture. Here Cariou has captured the narrow attitudes of his hometown, but not moved on to the bigger picture.