Jake and the Kid

by W.O. Mitchell

Book Overview

When Ma, the Kid, her twelve year old son, and Jake, the hired man, first appeared on the pages of Maclean's and shortly after on CBC Radio, the lively boy and his cranky hero found their way into the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 077041771X
• ISBN13: 9780770417710
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great Stories About Prairie Life

This is the original collection of Jake and The Kid from 1961-62. W.O. Mitchell is a highly regarded Canadian prairie author who wrote about life in Canada. We wrote with a great deal of passion, humor, and emotion. His stories are often simple, but very entertaining. They leave the reader laughing or crying or both. Few have his talents for writing. In his day when Canada had a population of fifteen to twenty million or so, he sold a bit less than one million books and if he had been an American writer he probably could have been an equal to John Steinbeck or similar. This is a great collection of 13 short stories, under 200 pages long. They are narrated by Jake and alternately by "the kid." They are stories about their life on a Saskatchewan farm near Crocus, Saskatchewan, which we can assume is realistic but fictional. The kid's ma is alive, but the father is dead and Jake is a surrogate father of sorts, and of course he is the "hired hand" on the farm. He does most of the work and manages the planting and harvesting, etc. The stories are set in a time spanning the WWII era up to the early 1950s. The stories touch a lot of current and universal issues and themes including the people who fought in WWII, school teachers, medical care, the courts, getting old, etc. most of these issues are still at the front of the social agenda. I liked all the stories; but, I especially liked the one where the kid got a new horse at the auction. Also, Mitchell is able to create a lot of charm and attraction in his descriptions of the life on the sometimes bleak prairies. As a comment, Mitchell has a new 1989 collection also named after the famous 1950s CBC radio series and the earlier book titled "According to Jake and The Kid." The newer book is about 50% bigger than the original collection of short stories from 1962. This new collection has mostly all new stories, but not 100%, and a few of the stories are based on the original stories and have altered and improved plots. This is a wonderful collection. It is highly entertaining and most will love the book. Suggested follow up reading are his other two famous books: Jake and the Kid (1989) and Who Has Seen The Wind (1947), both of course by Mitchell.