Plinky Prompt #1

Name a book that changed your mind or opened your eyes.

Mrs. Mike, I think I was in the 3rd or 4th grade when I read it. Maybe it was the romance, the adventure, or the sadness mixed with joy; but this was the first book I kept and re-read. I still re-read it every so often and I'm 42 now. This book has gone with me to every college and every apartment I've ever had. It is tattered and torn and the pages were yellow when I discovered it on a shelf in our laundry room in Jersey over 30 years ago. It's still in print but the cover is different. If it were still that pretty blue with white and black ink and picture I might buy a new one.

I've always been a reader but I think this book really started my love of books. I think it's why I can't just buy a paperback, read it and throw it away. Mrs. Mike was the first book I remember reading in which the characters meant something to me and held a place in my heart.

A classic girl's adventure yarn, Mrs. Mike is the real-life tale of Katherine Mary O'Fallon, a turn-of-the-last-century Boston lass who, stricken with pleurisy, (one of those literary wasting diseases about which one no longer hears) is sent to Canada to take in the bracing fresh air at her uncle's cattle ranch. She weds Mountie Mike Flannigan after seeing him a mere handful of times and joins him in the wilds of British Columbia. Yet this is no happily-ever-after trifle: Every tender moment is offset by tragedy, every triumph booby-trapped with loss. Kathy announces she's pregnant, and shortly afterward a fire levels her town, destroying her home, incinerating her neighbor's son. In the absence of doctors, Mike must assist in amputating a man's leg (without anesthesia). Tension simmers among whites, "'breeds," and Indians. Mosquitoes drive men mad.

When the couple's own two children perish from diphtheria—a disease that would have been treatable had they lived closer to civilization—Kathy breaks. She leaves Mike to return to Boston. But the harsh country, as much as her husband's love, has changed her, and eventually she goes back. They adopt the children of friends (who also died in the epidemic) and begin again, knowing they may well lose this family too. By the book's final page, Kathy is barely 19 years old.