Leaving Home

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

These three books are based on the popular Canadian-made television
series about a family that struggles to survive and stay together during
the Great Depression. Hub and Fat Baily are mischievous young boys who
are being raised against their will by May Baily, their rich, pompous,
and domineering paternal grandmother. (Their father, Jack Baily, married
a working-class Irish woman against his mother’s wishes. After Jack
died in a freak accident, May uses her power to seize Hub and Fat from
their penniless mother, Honey Baily.) Trapped in their grandmother’s
mansion, the boys have two allies: Aunt Grace, their father’s
30-something spinster sister who is just starting to rebel against
May’s ruthless authority; and Max Sutton, a man who runs the local
sports programs.

The Wind at My Back television series was mildly popular mainly because
it was marketed as having been produced by the “same creators as the
wildly popular Road to Avonlea.” The books are two generations removed
from that touchstone of success and the stretch marks are beginning to
show. The writing in all three books is uniformly bland. It seems that
every visual cliché present in the original scripts has been carefully
preserved. Most optimists believe that you can sometimes turn a sow’s
ear into a silk purse. These three books prove that the process can also
be reversed. Not recommended.