Young, idealistic but frightfully naive, Kevin and Joanne decide to leave the urban streets of Toronto to homestead in the Peace River country. Life on the norther frontier, they learn, is far removed from anything they had experienced in the past. Even being jobless in the mean streets of a large city has nothing to compare with the troubles of homesteading in a norther climate. While The Spruces is set in the years of the Great Depression, the scene it describes is in many ways a forerunner to the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s when young and idealistic city people packed up and moved to isolated parts of Canada and tried to become self-sufficient. However, few of the later adventures ended as tragically as The Spruces.