Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Mrs. Mike was one of my favorite books when I was young. When
I ran across this sequal I was hoping for something at least
half as good as the original. I'm afraid that I was disappointed.
There are sections in the book that were somewhat interesting,
but that interest didn't keep going. Too many characters did not
grow and change. Some were just plain self-centered, and never
seemed able to get past that - even given the supposed life
altering war that they lived through. Some things moved too
slowly. Some things moved too fast. The pacing just didn't seem
right to me in places. And yet I still managed to find just a
touch of something in the story that made me want to finish it
and see how things would turn out. I just wish that the story
all fit together better, and that it moved more smoothly.

I first read Mrs. Mike almost forty years ago and enjoyed it very much. I reread it several times and I'm sure the story of Katherine Mary Flannigan influenced me to pursue a Ph.D. in history with an emphasis on women in the West. I was delighted to see this sequel appear, but Mrs. Mike barely shows up in the new work. The rich descriptions aren't there either, and the overuse of dialog to carry the story was annoying to me. Also this work is burdened with presentism, applying language and values of today rather than those in place fifty years ago. Oh Be Joyful's Daughter's story is a fascinating one on its own, and her struggle against racism is important to remember. But I wanted more of the charm of the original, and more about Mrs. Mike.

"Mrs. Mike" is one of my favorite childhood books, so I was excited to find a brand-new sequel on the new fiction shelf at the library. Well, I just finished it, and I'm sad to say it was a pretty big disappointment. It's not really a sequel to "Mrs. Mike" since she barely makes an appearance. The heroine, Mrs. Mike's adopted Cree daughter, never really surfaces as a realistic character. The dialogue is often stilted and the situations unbelievable. Was this REALLY written by the Freedmans? Hard to believe. Evidently other sequels are planned...hope they are an improvement.

I was interested to see how the two sequals of the Mrs. Mike story would turn out. I was so disapointed. Both stories are disjointed and have no flow of continuity from on to the other.
The Search for Joyful could have been done indepth with the characters presented but stops short of real exploration. Also it had some things in it that prevented me from giving it to my early teen daughters to read as I did Mrs. Mike. They loved that story as did I at their age and such good examples of what real love can be and do. Katy Little Bird is even worse becaouse it is longer What happend to Crazy Dancer? Does he morph into Jellett? Save your money folks untill I get the time to do the rewrite for the authors. I know I can do better with the story line.

This book was terrible compared to Mrs. Mike. The characters are 2-dimensional, you lack any emotion for them, nor do you even care what happens to them. You could take this story, stick in a soap opera and not know the difference, as that is what this story basically is, a soap opera. Not at all worthy of being "the long-awaited sequel to Mrs. Mike." This book, was simply terrible, as a sequal and as a book in general. The plot is way too divided, you do not care what happens to these people at all, and the ending is what makes it especially like a soap opera. If you are a fan of Mrs. Mike and see this in the library, check it out and read it, but otherwise don't waste your money on this piece of crap book.

This book was lousy and I walked away very disappointed. If you read it, don't expect "Mrs. Mike"-- at all. Since I can't find any way to write the Freedmans and tell them what I thought, I wanted to share my thoughts somewhere. I recently discovered "Mrs. Mike" at a bookstore and read almost half the book before leaving the store. It was so good I automatically bought this sequel at the same time without a second thought. The sequel, if it can even be called that, was one of the worst stories I've read, and I read A LOT. I had a hard time caring about the characters or respecting them, and the story did not ring with truth or love as "Mrs. Mike." The ending was totally screwed up and had a very strange feeling to it. Then I realized this was probably because they MADE UP THIS STORY! I think it's really mean of the authors to present the book without making that very, very clear to the readers. And how do you suppose the real characters reacted to it? A big reason why "Mrs. Mike" appealed to me was the basis on true events. Naturally, I expected this sequel would continue that way. That's just one of the major differences between the books. Read it at your own risk! As for me, I wish I hadn't read "The Search for Joyful." It even tainted my enjoyment of "Mrs. Mike."

I first read the wonderful story of Mrs Mike as a ten year old child growing up in an isolated northern community. Every few years I have gone back to recapture the magic and enjoy the wonderful descriptions of joy and hardships growing up in Northern Canada. It was with great anticipation that I looked forward to a continuation of the story. Although the story was enjoyable it failed to recapture the magic. The main characters did not have the depth of the original story and many of the terms and viewpoints used in the novel make it a story that would be more believable in a modern setting rather than in the 1940's.