In publishing Frederick Philip Grove’s The Adventure of Leonard Broadus, Rock’s Mills Press has brought to light a boys’ adventure novel that some will regard as a Canadian classic. Recommended. – Ruth Latta, CM Magazine.
This novel is a fast-paced action adventure in which a thirteen-year-old boy, Leonard Broadus, works with the police to detect and capture a gang of thieves who are operating near the Lake Erie shoreline of Ontario in the 1930s. Leonard uses the skills of a farmboy in attempting to avoid capture by an unknown enemy and the intuition of a detective to solve what appears to be a mystery without an answer. The author, Frederick Phillip Grove, tells a tale which features the towns and topography of the area just north of the Lake Erie shoreline and the ambiance of the Depression of the 1930s and connects young Leonard Broadus with the visit, and the persons, of the King and Queen in their visit to Toronto and Niagara Falls in 1939. –John Passfield, author of Pinafore Park
Frederick Philip Grove (1871-1948) wrote a single children’s novel in his lifetime, a gripping tale of survival, resourcefulness, and intrigue set in Depression-era Ontario. The novel was first published in 1939 as installments in a church magazine, heavily redacted and poorly publicized. The Adventure of Leonard Broadus is now available here, in Grove’s original composition.
The coming-of-age story begins with a robbery and a runaway raft adventure. In the style of classic children’s literature like Swallows and Amazons and Huckleberry Finn, the danger that follows soon begins to feel very real. The fast-moving and very readable narrative depicts Leonard’s resourcefulness and endurance, qualities that enable him to survive some alarming circumstances.
Grove was a first-rate writer and story-teller, with keen abilities as a realist. He was also a man of many sides who had emigrated to Canada from a dark past in Europe. Ontario in the late 1930s is depicted as a very different society than today, with impoverished hobos travelling the countryside. Leonard’s adventure may well recall some of Grove’s own early travels in the new world.
