There are books so poignant and so intense that it is hard to believe they do not spring out of personal experience, and one's problem is not to determine the ultimate source but to decide how directly actual events in the author's life are being presented. Gabrielle Roy's latest book, Children of My Heart, is—in my view—one of these rare works. I began to read it with apprehension, since the very subject—a young teacher's relationship with the children she taught—seemed at first fraught with all the perils of sentiment melting into sentimentality; I ended with the sense of surprised satisfaction one experiences when, in this cynical and knowing world of ours, a romantic vision is convincingly carried through into a work of art, when the real and the lyrical are effectively united.

Since it has a single uniting character, the anonymous young woman teacher who tells her own story, Children of My Heart can be regarded as a novel…. (p. 50)

[One] wonders how closely it resembles the kind of memoir Gabrielle Roy might have written of her own life in those years before she became a famous novelist, when she taught in the kinds of schools she describes. Perhaps it is the most notable sign of her artistry that we are not long concerned with this question, for it is the girl in the story as she stands in our mind's eye who holds our attention and not the writer whose persona she may and may not be. Children of My Heart stands, as all fiction should, on its own without the need to refer to its author's life. (p. 51)

The last and longest episode is the most complex, taking up more than a third of the book and telling of Médéric, a rebellious thirteen-year-old boy who is tamed, if that is the right term, by the teacher…. As the novel ends Médéric rides wildly beside her departing train and throws into the window a bouquet of prairie flowers, many of them rare ones. "It spoke of the young and fragile summer, barely born but it begins to die."

And this is the general feeling of Children of My Heart, the feeling of one of those lost summers of growing up when everything was seen and experienced with preternatural intensity and the world seemed to be divided as sharply into the dark and the luminous as the prairie village when the narrator first saw it, with its dingy houses of embittered old people in a setting of "desert spaces and the marvellous silence." There is an almost Wordsworthian progress from the light of innocence so clearly ignited in the younger children to the darkness of experience that Médéric begins to enter, and it is this knowledge that even love cannot wholly proof the spirit against adversity that makes so real the romanticism of Children of My Heart. Gabrielle Roy writes here at the height of her form. (p. 52)