Children's Fiction Trees & Forests
The Year of Fire
- Publisher
- Groundwood Books Ltd
- Initial publish date
- May 2025
- Category
- Trees & Forests, Disasters, NON-CLASSIFIABLE
- Recommended Age
- 6 to 9
- Recommended Grade
- 1 to 4
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781779460547
- Publish Date
- May 2025
- List Price
- $16.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781779460554
- Publish Date
- May 2025
- List Price
- $14.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
A timely new edition of a story about a wildfire from beloved children’s book creators Teddy Jam and Ian Wallace.
It’s maple syrup time and an old grandfather tells his granddaughter about the great fire of 1919, when the whole county caught fire and burned for a year. No one knew how it started, but every able-bodied man, woman and child tried to fight the fire. The grandfather and his brother — children at the time — helped fill buckets of water from the creek. Only the snow finally seemed able to smother it. But the next spring they were all amazed to discover that the fire had kept going all winter in the soil, destroying the roots of the trees as it burned.
Now a new forest has grown over the scar, but the grandfather can still see the traces of the fire and show them to his grandchild.
At a time when wildfires are causing increasing devastation, this new edition of a classic children’s book recounts an event that changed the lives of all who experienced it — and brings a perspective of hope in its portrayal of recovery after the fire. It’s a memory that becomes a story to share with future generations.
Key Text Features
illustrations
dialogue
chapters
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.1
Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.6
Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.5
Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text, using terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza; describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.3.7
Explain how specific aspects of a text's illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting)
About the authors
Teddy Jam (Matt Cohen) was the pseudonymous author of many wonderful children's books, including Night Cars (which Michele Landsberg called "the Canadian Goodnight Moon"), This New Baby, and The Year of Fire, The Stoneboat, The Kid Line and The Fishing Summer, now collected in the anthology How We Were. He was also a novelist who won the Governor General's Award for his last novel, Elizabeth and After.
Ian Wallace has had a distinguished career as an author and illustrator of picture books, publishing many classics such as Chin Chiang and the Dragon’s Dance, Boy of the Deeps and The Huron Carol. His visual interpretation of Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot received three starred reviews and was named a USBBY Outstanding International Book and a Resource Links’ Year’s Best. He has won the Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Award, the Mr. Christie’s Book Award, the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award. He has also been nominated for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award and the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. Ian lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deb.
Excerpt: The Year of Fire (by (author) Teddy Jam; illustrated by Ian Wallace)
At the creek all the men were cutting down trees and trying to make a space wide enough that the fire couldn’t jump across. The fire was burning so loud everyone had to shout. John and I were supposed to fill the buckets in the creek and carry them to the men.
By now, the fire took up the whole sky. All the boys were there helping their fathers. John was already so strong he could carry two buckets to my one. Bits of wood started to fly through the air like bombs, closer and closer. Everyone soaked themselves in the creek so they wouldn’t catch on fire, then they kept working — until a giant branch landed in the creek with a big hiss, like a burning crocodile, and exploded all over everyone.
