The Winter Helen Dropped By

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.

The Winter Helen Dropped By is about a year in a rural Albertan
community called the Six Towns area during the early 1940s. As in
virtually all

of Kinsella’s writing, baseball and Natives appear as themes in this
book, but his main effort is directed at creating an overview of an
entire community.

The protagonist is a young boy named Jamie O’Day, who lives on an
isolated farm with his two American parents, a pig named Abigail
Uppington, and a cowardly dog named Benito Mussolini. Most of their
neighbors are immigrants from Scandinavia, the United States, or Eastern
Europe. As a first-generation Western Canadian, Jamie speaks English in
his own peculiar voice—a rambling, repetitive drawl.

In scope and technique, the book invites comparison more to Roch
Carrier’s novels about rural Quebec than to Kinsella’s earlier
works. It is a subtle tale, told with almost too much authenticity at
times (because Jamie O’Day’s repetitive monologue has a tendency to
wear thin on the reader over the long haul). Fortunately, Kinsella’s
ability to tell a tale sustains this novel, which is more about a place
and a time than about anyone or anything in particular.