In my infinite wisdom,I chose to read this "heart warming" romantic saga of Boston girl who married a "rugged Canadian Mountie " as a light read to take my mind off another ghastly round of semester exams. If you are in need of further proof of my imbecilic notions I was reading this in tandem with Carson Mc Culler's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter .My cup runneth over.Before I start ranting and frothing at the mouth let me just ask the wise folk here who apparently read this book when they were 10 or 12 years old and can't seem to stop rhapsodising about its charms- WHY??? What on earth is wrong with you? To start with the minor issues (and this really is a broad hint about the rest of the novel) the girl is SIXTEEN YEARS OLD when our "rugged" hero swoops in with his blue,blue eyes(" "you can swim in them) and his twenty seven years of experience. When I was sixteen my dreams usually involved freedom from parental interference and giant vats of kesar pista ice cream.( well,ok maybe Hayden Christensen did make occasional cameos also).Horrible things happen in this book .The fact that this is inspired by a true story makes it all the more gory.A mother sawing off her own son's mangled gangrenous limbs after he fell foul of a forgotten bear trap,an ethereal aristocratic woman whose every breath seems to be dogged by death,misery as she outlives all of her children,grisly deaths,charred human bodies ,uncontrollable forest fires,mass graves- anything that you can possibly imagine going wrong will.The book pulls no punches in describing these events in unsparing,sincere prose.I am old enough to realise that even as debates on female equality rage on,there were darker times when we were denied a voice not just because of our gender but because of our breed.That's right ,not race.Breed.Still, I refuse to stand by a man who is the law in the great wilderness and yet all he can manage is an averted shamed face when a native Indian woman is used to replace a lame Husky to pull a dog sled caravan.With other dogs.While the rider whips them and her along. I don't bloody well care if the Indian woman was brainwashed into doing it out of misplaced notions of loyalty or love.You cannot be a human being and just watch another person being debased in this fashion.No matter how much you may commiserate with a man's past sorrows you cannot sit in the same room where another woman,foolish enough to fall for him, sits silent and bleeding from a knife wound he just carelessly inflicted.Ignoring the ridiculous manner in which our hero dismissed women as "unpredictable " or the even more ludicrous reaction his words elicited from her, I will never use " love" to describe his feelings for her.There is a bizarre idea that has taken root in common psyche that women like having a gruff,charming,honest Abe kind of fellow who brushes aside our petty,niggling qualms as childish twaddle while he takes charge,kisses us silly and leads us along the right path. Pure rot. Nobody ever complained of too much kissing but if every (or for that matter any kiss) is accompanied by "kitten" he may not have much of a mouth left to use afterwards.Sergeant Mike Flannigan is an upstanding capable fellow.As Kathy describes him ,he is solid and enduring. But his reasoning for braving the elements in an untamed country where mosquitoes can kill you,wolves bay ghoulishly outside your cabins so that they could "live the real life" is flimsy at best. (view spoiler)[ You don't bring a wife and children into an environment where you don't have basic amenities. You don't bring up children in a place miles from civilisation where diphtheria can kill them in a matter of hours because of lack of availability of medicine. Most incriminatingly, Sgt Mike had seen first hand- the corpses,the debauchery,the desolation that an entire village is reduced to as the most common disease spreads like wildfire through its occupants. I will hold him responsible for the deaths of his children..always. And I appreciate Kathy for suddenly waking up to the same notion but her ultimate decision to return to him is unfathomable to me. (hide spoiler)]
This wasn't on my list of scheduled reads but while I was in a bookstore last month to purchase a book for a Christmas exchange, I saw Mrs. Mike on the shelves and felt compelled to buy this much beloved book.I'm often asked what my favorite book is. I always answer that I don't have one; there are many books I love but they are too different to say one is superior to another.I have changed my mind. Mrs. Mike is my favorite book.A coming of age story set in the Canadian North in the year 1907, Katherine Mary O'Fallon, a young woman of 16, goes to live with her uncle somewhere north of Calgary as treatment for her pleurisy. There she meets Sergeant Mike Flannigan, a Mountie who has "eyes so blue she could swim in them." They are eventually married after a brief (but fantastically romantic) courtship and she follows him by dog sled to the arctic wilderness to live among the fur traders and Indians.I love this book for many reasons. Most importantly, as a book, it's my first love. Mrs. Mike was the book that made me realized how much a book could move and stick with me for years. I rarely re-read a book, but I believe I've read Mrs. Mike five times now. Each time, my stomach swoons when Kathy and Mike fall in love, I laugh when Kathy covers her daughter and Mike spanks Kathy instead, I cry when the unimaginable happens and I sigh as I close the book, thinking the line at the very end is one of the best ever written.Another reason I love this book is that it's based on a real woman's life who the authors met before writing the book. I'm sure it's juiced from the reality, but even the skeleton of the story is moving.I can't claim that it's the best written book. It is simple in structure, dialogue and description, but as I've read more and more over the years, and compare it to other literature, I believe the style matches the story perfectly.It's the kind of book I can't help but promise that anyone who reads it will love it. But I also know that with our diverse personalities and preferences, it wouldn't be true. Like a biased mother who adores her baby, I don't think I'd enjoy anyone pointing out the flaws of this book. Perhaps its eyes are too close together and the head oddly-shaped, but it's my baby, and I think it's the most beautiful thing in the world.
Do You like book Mrs. Mike (2002)?
I read this book in high school and was obsessed with it! I think I read it about a dozen times. I purchased a copy last year and can't wait to re-read it.
—Denise Gianelli
Benedict and Nancy Freedman, the two partners in the husband-wife writing team who co-wrote this and several other novels, were born, respectively, in 1919 and 1920; so when writing historical fiction, like Dickens and Stephen Crane, they chose to set it in the generation immediately before their own, where the world they were writing about was still a living memory, and could be researched through living voices. As the Goodreads description above indicates, the primary setting here is northern Canada, in the years from 1907 to the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19. Our narrator here is young Katherine Mary O'Fallon, and the novel centers around her marriage and home-making with Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (The earlier chapters are set in Calgary, where the couple meet.) Love is at the heart of the story, but it's not a commercial "romance;" it doesn't end with the courtship and wedding, but instead focuses mainly on the story of the developing and growing marriage --and in the Realist tradition from which the Freedmans write, genuine love doesn't insulate a couple from the challenges and tragedies of life.Indeed, tragedy and sorrow are not uncommon ingredients of this story, though happy events and humor play their role, too. This is a realistic picture of life in a harsh, unforgiving natural environment, faced without the benefit of high technology. Disease, injury, wild animals that can be lethal, blizzards and numbingly cold winters, hordes of mosquitoes, relative poverty (by our standards), hard work, and the need to enforce law in an often lawless world are normal parts of life for the Flannigans and their neighbors. But it also shows the reality of love, courage, friendship, inner strength, and a human spirit that can triumph even in the face of tragedy and sorrow. The authors do a wonderful job of evoking this world of the Indians and the Metis, of largely unspoiled wilderness, at a time when it's on the cusp of change (not necessarily for the better), facing the ravages of modernity. (They also provide a basically sympathetic view of the role of the Roman Catholic faith in the lives of many of their characters.) Characters are well drawn, and the quality of the writing is excellent.I would not hesitate to say that this is one of the better serious novels, of any genre and any time period, that I've read so far. (At the time it was written, it garnered very good reviews from a critical community that was then less jaded and more genuinely perceptive.) If it gets its due in the estimation of literary history, IMO, it will one day be reckoned as one of the best examples of the 20th century American historical novel.
—Werner
I first read this when I was about 13 or 14 years old and remembered it fondly. After all these years I was afraid it might be too sanitized for my grown-up self. I needn't have worried. Pollyanna Sunshine is nowhere to be found, and my years of life experience only made the book more meaningful for me. This is a realistic account of the joys and hardships of life in northern Alberta in the early 1900s. I grew so attached to Mike and Katherine that I wanted the story to keep going. It's not surprising that the book has remained popular for over fifty years. Have your tissues ready for the last few chapters.
—Jeanette "Astute Crabbist"
