The Search for Joyful (The Story of Mrs. Mike Continues) [Hardcover]

Benedict Freedman (Author), Nancy Freedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2002

When her dear friend Oh Be Joyful died in a flu epidemic, Mrs. Mike Flannigan opened her home-and heart-to her orphaned child, Kathy Forquet. But as the terrors of World War II drew closer to home, Kathy left her small Canadian town to join the war effort-and enrolled at a nursing school in Montreal.

The Search for Joyful is her story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Apparently some sequels take longer to appear than others: more than 50 years after the publication of the popular Mrs. Mike, which told of Mary O'Fallon's journey from Boston to Alberta and her marriage to RCMP Sgt. Mike Flanagan, the story continues during WWII with one of Mary's adopted children, Kathy Forquet. Mike has been dead for six years and Kathy, whose background is Cree, decides to learn more about the heritage of her late mother, Oh-Be-Joyful. She is also determined to find out the difference between joy and mere happiness, so she leaves her small Canadian town to train as a nurse in Montreal, which Mary refers to as "sin city." There, Kathy begins to stand up for herself and explores romance with two men, one of whom shares her heritage, the other an Austrian soldier whose wounds she tends. The Mrs. Mike who presumably made the original so charming to generations of readers is hardly present here, merely framing Kathy's tale. As for Kathy, her voice never gains any real sophistication and when she does things like chauffeur a general to Naples because she's an "ace" driver, her Zelig-like position at the center of events lacks verisimilitude. Meanwhile, other characters talk as though they're reading from history texts rather than being participants in the world at war around them. Some downright weird sentences ("There's a big wad of undigested feeling stuck in me") should have been edited out, and in the end, Kathy, a small-scale heroine who is more acted upon than acting, isn't allowed to find joy; it is visited upon her.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Benedict and Nancy Freedman are at work on more books in the Mrs. Mike saga.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 309 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Books (February 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425183335
• ISBN-13: 978-0425183335
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,775,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 50 Years Not Too Late For a Sequel, February 27, 2002

By 

John Leasure (Portsmouth, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Search for Joyful (The Story of Mrs. Mike Continues) (Hardcover)

I found this book by accident in a [local store]and immediately snatched it up...I usually would wait and order from Amazon, but seeing the book I really wanted to read it now.

I read "Mrs. Mike" a very long time ago (I was eight). I read it as a great adventure...my sister read it as a romance. I could never understand that aspect until I read the book again in my twenties. The wonderful thing about this (The Search for Joyful) book is that, yes, there are the elements of romance but again the heroine goes on an adventure that imparts information about history from an unique perspective. Anytime a book can teach, entertain and be subtle about it is a plus.

I enjoyed the book almost as much as I had "Mrs. Mike" years ago. It was a pleasant read, made me laugh, made me cry in places and made me hope there wasn't going to be another 50-year wait for more stories about Mrs. Mike and her family.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a sequel to Mrs. Mike, April 13, 2004

By 

Justine Cardello (Nice, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Search for Joyful: A Mrs. Mike Novel (Paperback)

The cover of this book says "The story of Mrs. Mike continues" but that is certainly a stretch of the truth. This is not a sequal to Mrs. Mike, but another story entirely. I wanted to find out what happened to Kathy and Sgt. Mike, after the original story ends. Instead, the story switches over to the Flannigan's adopted daughter, and we get the briefest hint of Mrs. Mike's life from the time the first book ended, until this story begins in 1941. Mrs. Mike barely appears, she is the most minor of characters. Sgt. Mike's death is told in a page and a half, and as a flashback.

The story itself, about the daughter, is really bad. I wonder--is this supposed to be a true story as well, or did the Freedman's just make this up? If it's not true, then they have the poorest of imaginations. The story is flat, dull, and the ending about the most ridiculous I've read in a long time.

But even if this is the "true" story of Kathy Forquet, then the Freedman's told it in about the most lifeless form possible. The historical backdrop reads like a textbook, you get no feel for the period at all. The characters are flat, emotionless, the diagloge stilted and silly. It is hard to believe that this is the same couple who wrote the original Mrs. Mike.

I believe they have a third "Mrs. Mike" story coming out. I tend to guess it will be about the third Kathy, the granddaughter.

I would really love them to write a real sequel about Mrs. Mike, or at least, if they feel they must do this family sage, to at least tell us what became of Mrs. Mike. Did she ever return to Boston? What happened to her family? When and where did she die? Even in this book, we never really know how she continued to support herself after her husband died. I would assume she had some sort of pension, but all we know is that he died, and then the story jerks back to the present, and we hear no more of her.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A different journey, but a rewarding one., June 22, 2003

By 

Nina M. Osier (Randolph, ME USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Search for Joyful (The Story of Mrs. Mike Continues) (Hardcover)

If you are looking for another book "just like MRS. MIKE," I'm afraid that THE SEARCH FOR JOYFUL will disappoint you. It's about a different young woman's journey out of girlhood, set in an entirely different era even though it begins just one generation after the classic tale of a Canadian Mountie's bride. While Katherine Mary Flannigan is among its characters, this is her adopted daughter's story. I'm glad I was able to put aside my preconceptions and let Kathy Forquet take me along on her own unique journey, because I found it a very rewarding trip.

This Kathy, as readers of MRS. MIKE will remember, came into the lives of Mike and Kathy Flannigan after their one-time household helper - the Cree girl Oh-Be-Joyful, who ran away to marry a half-breed trapper named Jonathan Forquet - died and left a baby daughter behind. Jonathan brought the child to the woman his young wife had called her "more than sister," and the Flannigans added the little girl to their adopted twins. Who, with their French ancestry, fit in among the northern Alberta village's white youngsters; while small copper-skinned Kathy, a First Nation child growing up in a white family, fit in nowhere except at home. "Kathy is to be included," Mrs. Mike consistently told Connie and Georges. But as her story opens, Kathy Forquet is striking out on her own for the first time - to answer her country's World War II call for young women to study nursing - and merely being "included" is no longer enough.

In the cosmopolitan city of Montreal, she find a profession to excel at and to love. She also finds prejudice among her fellow nursing students, and even - eventually - in the family of the young man she marries. But there is another young man, a fellow "Indian" also serving in the Canadian Army; and there are friends like Kathy's roommate Mandy, her old schoolmate Elk Girl, and "Sister Egg."

Through study and hard work, through coming under enemy fire in a front-line medical unit, through loving and losing and learning to love again, young Kathy journeys just as far in this book as her adoptive mother did in MRS. MIKE. It is written with more frankness because it was, after all, published 50 years later. If you're planning to hand it to your child, be warned about that! But I personally thought it well done, and well worth reading.