In 1883, when Willa Cather was nine years old, her family moved from Virginia to an isolated Nebraska farm on the Divide, a broad plateau between the Little Blue and Republican rivers. This long, uncomfortable journey began by train and ended by wagon. In this story, young Willa moves from a much-loved landscape of trees and streams to what she first perceives as an empty, barren place. Eventually she comes to appreciate its particular beauty, a process helped along by friendships with her Swedish, Danish, Bohemian, and Norwegian neighbours. But The Divide is not just about a girl overcoming her homesickness to adapt to a new life; it also charts the awakening of the artistic spirit.

As in his last picture-book biography, Emily (about a little girl’s encounter with Emily Dickinson), Bedard has written an exquisite story in keeping with the subject. Emily was a collaboration with Barbara Cooney; The Divide’s pictures are by another distinguished American illustrator, Emily Arnold McCully, who is perhaps best known for the Caldecott Medal winner Mirette on the High Wire, which she also wrote. Her sensitive and lively watercolours show determined homesteaders with the sod houses and tilled fields dwarfed by the endless expanse of grass and sky. The lush double-page spreads are as lyrical as Bedard’s deeply felt text. There are references to themes in Willa Cather’s writing; the indomitable spirit and courage of the pioneers, especially the women, and the power and energy of the land itself.

The Divide is a mood piece that follows the cycle of the seasons and ends on a note of promise. There is a certain distance in the telling; it’s a third-person narrative without dialogue. Still, the details Bedard and McCully highlight are intimate. I only wish Bedard had recounted a few snippets of the many stories young Willa heard from her immigrant neighbours, stories that she later drew on in her own writing. School-aged readers are likely the best audience for this book. Use it with Jim McGugan’s equally sophisticated Josepha: A Prairie Boy’s Story, or any of the fine picture-book biographies of artists such as Alan Schroeder’s Ragtime Tumpie – or, of course, Emily.