Two interesting facts for young Canadian patriots: we didn’t get our own flag until 1965; and “O Canada” wasn’t adopted as our official national anthem until 1980, when Parliament passed the National Anthem Act. Maxine Trottier’s Our Canadian Flag is an appropriately sentimental homage to our maple leaf standard. Peter Kuitenbrouwer, in Our Song, presents a more factual account of the long and interestingly tortuous genesis of the anthem.

Inspired by the roar of a waterfall, the music for “O Canada” was written by Calixa Lavallée, a composer from Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. Commissioned by the planning committee for an 1880 celebration of French culture in North America, the song was supplied with lyrics by Adolphe-Basile Routhier, who later became chief justice of Quebec. The French lyrics have never been changed. The English ones, however, proved an agonizing business. No one had a problem with the music itself. The tune, everybody agreed, was a killer. Everyone was playing it and humming it from coast to coast, apparently. Unfortunately, they were all making up their own words.

Now here’s a mortifying bit of history: just as it took an American publisher to launch Anne of Green Gables (arguably Canada’s most iconic literary work), it took an American magazine to exhort English Canadians to come up with lyrics for their own national anthem. In 1908, Colliers ran a contest for the best lyrics to “O Canada.” After the magazine announced its winner, the choice was praised by the music critic of the Toronto Mail and Empire – but the lyrics never took off. People continued to make up their own versions until 1927, when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King selected the lyrics of a Montreal judge, Robert Stanley Weir, as the version of “O Canada” that would be published and sung for the Diamond Jubilee, Canada’s 60th birthday. With minimal changes, this is the anthem we sing today.

The first title in the new My Canada series from Lobster Press, Our Song is ably written by Kuitenbrouwer. But although the book is informative, it’s unlikely to be hugely engaging for young readers. That’s because there’s really no point of entry for children: to be brutally reductive, it’s just a bunch of old dead guys writing words and passing laws. The design of the book is colourful but rather busy, with the text laid over a background of leaf motifs, which sometimes makes it difficult to read. Adding to the clutter, on alternate pages, are sidebars with timelines of interesting historical dates and events. The illustrations, by first-timer Ashley Spires, come across as amateurish, all the characters wearing the same gormless expression.

Maxine Trottier’s Our Canadian Flag is more successfully aimed at young readers. Its minimal text offers, on each page, a kind of observation or meditation about the flag. For instance: “It is a simple thing, this flag – two bars of bright red, with a red maple leaf against white. But Canada’s flag is more than a piece of cloth. It is the story of our country and its people.” On each facing page is a romanticized and subtly impressionistic illustration by Brian Deines. While the primary text is pleasant and sometimes poignant, it’s not hugely informative. That duty is reserved for the boxed text at the bottom of each page. Here, we get a capsule history of the maple leaf as Canadian icon, and the various flags that have flown on Canadian soil. Trottier doesn’t overload her readers; page by page, however, she does jump around quite a lot chronologically, which is frustrating for those hoping for a linear narrative of the birth of the flag.

Our Canadian Flag is an attractive package: a strong, bold cover, clean layout, a spare text, and, most striking of all, the work of an accomplished painter. It’s heartening to see patriotic books about our nation and its history. In one sense, the flag and national anthem seem easy subjects for information books, and these books will likely fill the bill when it comes to school curriculum. But to write about them passionately – after all, they are inanimate objects – is surely no easy feat. In both cases, there’s nothing really to hold our attention except mild curiosity and dutifulness. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to concentrate on some compelling human drama or sideshow around these subjects. But maybe there simply wasn’t any. While Trottier’s book conveys gravity and respect for the flag, and Kuitenbrouwer’s contains some diverting facts, neither, I fear, will captivate young readers and make them hungry to learn more about their country.