Prairie Fire! tells how the Bains family, homesteading in Manitoba in the 1870s, find themselves in the middle of a dispute between other settlers and the Métis who roam the land – a dispute that ends with everyone becoming friends after they all help to put out the fire of the title. I know this story. I watched it unfold frequently in movies of my childhood, with cowboys instead of Métis and with various Indian uprisings and natural disasters in the role of the fire. I also remember it from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, in which a farmer’s daughter falls in love with a cowboy and everyone belts out an upbeat song about how farmers and cowboys should be friends. I was not, therefore, surprised when Prairie Fire! ended with young Meg Bains marrying a Métis after “the fire showed we could work and live together.” There is even dancing.

I was already in my youth as annoyed by the tiredness of this plot and the cheery optimism of its ending as I am now by Prairie Fire! This sort of sudden change of heart is neither likely as human behaviour nor accurate as history. No more authentic is the anachronistic tolerance of the Bains family: these 1870s children seem to have already passed the 1990s social studies courses in which preachy novels like Prairie Fire! play so much a part. For authenticity, Freeman, author of a number of other historical novels for children, often interrupts the plot with undigested lumps of detail about how the characters plough with an ox or build a sod house. Prairie Fire! tries to be a number of things at once: an exciting adventure, a lesson in contemporary civics, a description of the past. But its various threads never come together to make the detail seem relevant or the characters and messages persuasive.