When How I Spent My Summer Holidays was first published in 1981 a Western reviewer wrote: “If Who Has Seen the Wind told the story of a young boy’s coming to terms with death, How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells of a young man’s attempt to come to terms with his own sexuality and that of the world around him.”
The twelve-year-old young man is Hugh, and in small-town Saskatchewan it is the hot summer of 1924. When Hugh and his friends dig a secret cave out on the Prairie, they soon find it occupied by an escaped patient from the mental hospital. Defying the adult world, the boys become involved with a former war hero and current rum-runner, King Motherwell, in sheltering and feeding the runaway. When passions aroused by sex explode into murder, Hugh leaves his boyhood behind him for ever.
When I first started my Canadian reading project, W.O. Mitchell seemed to appear on every list of recommended authors.
How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells the story of a summer in 1924 when a group of boys were set on adventure and inadvertently got mixed up with a murder.
It is only several years later when the MC returns to his hometown that he is able to put his childhood memories into context and understands the story fully.
In many ways, How I Spent My Summer Holidays reminded me of the film Stand By Me. Both are coming of age stories in which a group of boys are faced with the discovery of a dead body, and in both stories, even though the boys set out as a group, every one of them gets to hold on to a different part of the story, a different reality which will eventually shape their lives.
