It is interesting to note that one thing missing from the coming-of-age story is the first inklings of love. Mitchell captures childhood scenes of all sorts is a thing of beauty. Today was to be his first day in school.īrian will grow up by about ten years over the course of the novel. His mother had put them there the night before. The curtains in his room breathed in and out with the fall breeze as he lay still beside his brother he could see his clothes folded over the foot of the white-enamelled iron bed. On the morning of the first day of September, the bright noise of sparrows just under the window high in the peaking front of the O’Connal house woke Brian. After a lavish if single-minded introduction, the story can finally begin in earnest. Then, through the magic of anagrams, Brian gets a dog and shifts his focus elsewhere. Everywhere he goes at first, everyone he talks to, everything conspires to feed the preschooler’s fascination with a higher power. The first few dozen pages had me growing wary, with young Brian obsessing over the existence and the meaning of God. The novel becomes a community and family chronicle as seen through his eyes. The years are those of the Great Depression and to make up for the comparative emptiness of his surroundings, the boy’s head proves full of questions. Set in a small town in Saskatchewan, Who Has Seen the Wind pairs vivid writing with the uneventful days of a boy growing up in the middle of a flat, scarcely populated landscape. The Canadian Prairies are the equivalent of the American Midwest.

Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell