Mrs. Mike (1947) – Benedict Freedman , Nancy Freedman Free Audiobook

Written by Benedict Freedman , Nancy Freedman
Read by Kirsten Potter
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: October 1, 2009
Duration: 11:30:48

Recently arrived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, after a long, hard journey from Boston, sixteen-year-old Katherine Mary O’Fallon never imagined that she could lose her heart so easily or so completely.

Mike Flannigan, standing over six feet tall, with “eyes so blue you could swim in them,” is a well-respected sergeant in the Canadian Mounted Police and a man of great courage, kindness, and humor. Together, he and his beloved Kathy manage to live a good, honest life in this harsh, unforgiving land and to find strength in a love as beautiful and compelling as the wilderness around them.

This is a fictionalized account of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, who in 1907, at 16, was sent from her home in Boston to Calgary, where the pure air was meant to restore her health. There she met Mike Flannigan, a Canadian Mountie with eyes “so blue you could swim in them.”

It is not so surprising that the novel, with its sweeping setting and persevering characters, captivated a weary postwar world. What is striking is that for a cohort of women born much later — circa 1960 — “Mrs. Mike” became a cherished mainstay of adolescence and beyond.

“Kathy is somebody who broke free of convention,” the journalist Peggy Orenstein, who first read the novel as a teenager in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “It was inspirational for a generation of women who were young teenagers during the early ’70s, when life for women and girls was changing really rapidly.”
“Mrs. Mike,” which remains in print, has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into more than two dozen languages.

The film adaptation, starring Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes, was released under the same title in 1949.