In celebration of the International Year of the Older Person (1999), award-winning Saskatchewan poet and novelist Shelley Leedahl has written a touching story of an old woman, once active and adventurous, “whose life had wound down like a clock.” Neighbours of all ages try various tactics to rouse poor Grandmother Bones from her apathy, but “her thoughts are tangled” and she just “sits there talking to her bones.” Eventually a little girl is able to break through her isolation by offering Grandmother Bones some pieces of cloth to stitch together.

Although Leedahl notes that the first line of the story came to her in a dream, it is the ending of the book that moves from poetic realism into fantasy, as the accumulated pieces of fabric given by neighbours and family flow in a gigantic quilt out the front door and across the fields. In a beautiful fusion of text and illustration, the final page portrays the prairie landscape, seen from above, as the patterned squares of a quilt.

The rich earth colours of Bill Slavin’s pictures masterfully evoke the village and its busy, homely people, and the layout of the book is generally attractive. The Bone Talker is, however, a book for an adult (with good reading glasses) to read to a child, particularly since the use of small print for all but the first line of each page makes the text look uninviting.