Shadows on the Rock

Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends--and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 09/26/1995
ISBN: 9780679764045
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.56lbs
Size: 8.12h x 5.12w x 0.65d

Review Citations: Booklist 04/01/2000 pg. 1442
Entertainment Weekly 02/15/2002 pg. 62

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 44560 / Shadows on the Rock
Reading Level: 6.8 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 11