Sunsets of the West
By: Tony Johnston

After reading the book “Sunsets of the West” I came to the realization that I liked this book a little but not a lot. Historical Fiction is not my favorite genre so I think that is why I wasn’t too fond of this book. This book chronicled the journey of a settler family traveling from Maine to the western prairie’s in a covered wagon. The two things that I liked most about this book were the illustrations and the hardships they showed to get to their new home in the West.

The illustrations in this book are great. They look as if they are old and fuzzy to make it seem like you are back in time instead of now in the sharp cartoon like illustrations you tend to see. The illustrations really help you to understand what is going on in the story. For example, in one of the illustrations it shows the wagons going through a roaring river that is rushing and flooding out the wagons. This helps to get across the point stated in the text that when it rained, the rivers that they had to cross turned into massive rushing rives that at time swept away the wagons. Another illustration that I really liked was one of a great sunset setting over the mountains in the west. This point in the story was where the family had finally made it across the country and were now at the western mountains that they had always dreamed of seeing and it was like a sigh of relief because they knew now that their journey was finally over.

The other thing that I really liked in this book was that it portrayed the hardships that many settlers most likely faced as they traveled across the country in horse drawn covered wagons. Some of these hardships that were included in this book was the fact that the family could only take some of their possessions with them and even the ones they took at some point they may have had to leave them behind, facing the Indians going through the plains and their lands, the harsh weather, and even death. While this is a children’s picture book, the author really wanted to show the children what it was really like to cross the country back then, not like it is today with cars, hotels, and fast-food.

The main message of this book is to show what families used to have to go through to travel across the country to move out to the West back in the time of covered wagons. This book really paints a good picture as to the lives, struggles, and journeys these people faced.

This story tells a story of a pioneer family journeying to the west. It tells of the things they had to do and presents a mild version of the difficulties they faced.
This story is a good example of historical fiction because it is realistic and it is set in a past time period. It is realistic because pioneers really did cross the country to get to the west, and they did face the struggles of death that are mentioned in this book. It is historical because an event like this would have occurred in the 1800s.
Media: watercolor
Age Appropriateness: Primary-Intermediate

Kind of boring, but good illustrations

I liked this historical fiction book because of two reasons. The idea of this book is to show and share the personal journey of a family's travel to the West. First, I love the realistic and memorizing illustrations of the book. The illustrator used brilliant watercolors to capture the landscape of the family's travels. For example, on one page, the author shows the landscape of a sunset. The illustrator had a gradient background with a rich orange, red, and yellow. Second, I enjoyed how the author matched the beautiful illustrations with descriptive writing. For example, “They came to the prairie, thick with flowers. There they saw great beasts chewing the flowers and the grass.” The illustration showed buffalos chewing on grass. I appreciated how the realistic pictures came alive to me as I read the authors writing. All in all, I would share this book with future students in order to show them realistic yet artistic visuals of America back then. ( )

This book was like reading the video game Oregon Trail for me. One was very reminiscent of the other. The illustrations were beautiful and the text was very nice as well. ( )