Heartland

I am the Heartland,
Great and wide.
I sing of hope.
I sing of pride.

Welcome to America's Heartland -- a place where the golden wheat waves in the breeze, where great rivers flow, and cornfields stretch across the plains in glorious patchwork quilts of greens and yellows and browns. Cattle graze in lush green pastures, horses and sheep fill the barns, and a new born calf stands damp and warm in the sun. This is the Heartland, where the farmer is king -- but over everything, Nature reigns supreme.

Evokes the land, animals, and people of the Middle West in poetic text and illustrations.

I am the Heartland,
Great and wide.
I sing of hope.
I sing of pride.

Welcome to America's Heartland -- a place where the golden wheat waves in the breeze, where great rivers flow, and cornfields stretch across the plains in glorious patchwork quilts of greens and yellows and browns. Cattle graze in lush green pastures, horses and sheep fill the barns, and a new born calf stands damp and warm in the sun. This is the Heartland, where the farmer is king -- but over everything, Nature reigns supreme.

Publishers Weekly

As with their Mojave , Siebert and Minor again take on the considerable challenge of treating land as character and narrator, with salutary results. Strong, assured verses and paintings create a vital celebration of the American midwest in its many faces, from farmland to town to cityscape. The ``patchwork quilt'' of fertile fields is dotted with storefronts and grain elevators; in turn, ``farm and city rhythms merge'' in the mills, stockyards and skyscrapers that rise out of the plains. Among these panoramas shines the quiet dignity of the farmer, the stolid serenity of his beasts and the majesty of the land itself. In less able hands, this could easily have lapsed into sentimentality. Siebert and Wendell skirt that possibility neatly in a paean which, reminiscent of the works of Carl Sandburg, embraces the harshness and wrinkles as well as the beauty of the land--a place where, as readers are reminded, ``Nature reigns.'' Ages 4-8. (Mar.)

Author Bio
Diane Siebert is the author of Mojave, a 1988 Booklist Children’s Editors’ Choice, a 1988 Notable Children’s Trade Book in Social Studies, and a 1989 Teachers Choice, and Heartland , a 1989 Booklist Children’s Editors’ Choice, a 1989 Notable Children’s Trade Book in Social Studies, and a 1990 Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts. Ms. Siebert lives at Crooked River Ranch, Oregon.