Nearly 40 years after the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, W.O. Mitchell returned to the Prairies to take another look at that earlier novel's treatment of childhood innocence. From old age, Hugh looks back at the summer of 1924, when he was 12. Hugh's experience is markedly different from young Brian O'Connal's in Who Has Seen the Wind. Here we find more sinister characters lurking in the background, including King Motherwell, an alcoholic bootlegger who murders his wife and lands in an insane asylum, and who is responsible for bringing Hugh's childhood to an end. Mitchell's publisher, Douglas Gibson, described the relationship between Who Has Seen the Wind and How I Spent My Summer Holidays as akin to that between Tom Sawyer and the darker, deeper Huckleberry Finn.
But though it is a much darker coming-of-age story, How I Spent My Summer Holidays retains Mitchell's love of the landscape, and there is still a sense of the gleeful joy of childhood when Hugh and his friend Peter set out to dig a secret cave. Even Hugh's boyish adulation for the adventurous King is understandable to a point. But the gentle Saint Sammy of the earlier book has been replaced by the tortured Billy, who has escaped from the abuses of the local insane asylum. How I Spent My Summer Holidays takes a more balanced look at rural Canadian life early in the 20th century than did Mitchell's first novel, but it is still a portrait full of affection. --Jeffrey Canton