I have been performing dismally in the current Canadian Book Challenge, so I knew I needed to amp it up quite a bit if I am to have any hope of completing the challenge by the end of June. Up until January, I’m ashamed to say I’d only read one book from my home country. That’s pretty pathetic! And it’s not like I don’t have a bunch on my shelf, waiting to be read. There are plenty, but I guess because they’re there, I feel like they’ll always be there and so I keep bumping them for newer and more popular fare. Ooooh, shiny!

So Mrs. Mike, a historical novel by Benedict and Mary Freedman, was one of those books languishing on one of my bookshelves. Mrs. Mike was written in 1947 and became a best seller in the United States, even being made into a film by the same name. Set in the northern wilderness of Alberta at the turn of the 20th century and based on the life of Katherine Mary Flannigan, I’d never heard of this book growing up on the east coast of Canada. It was only a couple of years ago that I stumbled upon its existence and I don’t even remember how I came to know about it. But its setting, combined with the title (my husband’s name is Michael, so I am a Mrs. Mike, too) convinced me to buy it when I came across a remaindered copy at a bookstore several months back. In drawing up my proposed reading list for January (yes, in 2010 I’ve done something I’ve never attempted before, and have created planned reading lists for each month, and if January is any indication, with mixed results), I included Mrs. Mike and after making my way through Beach Music, decided to opt for something less demanding and complicated. Mrs. Mike it was.

A sort of grown-up, Canadian version of Little House on the Prairie, in Mrs. Mike we meet Katherine Mary as a young girl of sixteen, on a train in the snowy, frozen northern wilderness. She is on her way from Boston to stay with a bachelor uncle in Alberta, with the hope that the cold, clean air will cure her pleurisy. Soon after her arrival, she meets Sergeant Mike Flannigan, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or Mountie, as they are popularly known. Love quickly blossoms and the two get married, whereupon Kathy accompanies Mike to his post on the fringes of Canadian territory, to live amongst the traders, trappers and Aboriginals in an outpost near Lesser Slave Lake. Kathy’s account is both an outsider and insider’s view of this strange land, written in the honest, non-politically correct language of the time (for instance, those who are part Aboriginal and part Caucasian are called ‘breeds – a shortened slang for half-breeds). She is an outsider when she arrives, unaccustomed to life in such an unforgiving landscape, but it eventually becomes a part of her, as she recognizes its beauty, accepts and adopts the love her husband has for the area, and finds comfort in the bonds made among those who call it home.

As I related in a recent post, I almost didn’t get to finish reading Mrs. Mike, since I found out about halfway through why my copy was remaindered: it was missing about 50 pages. Luckily, one of the branches in our library system had a large print version, so I was able to get that within a few days of coming to a sudden halt with my own book. Sadly, my copy is headed for the recycle bin, since it’s not much good to any other reader.