Kid on the Go‪!‬

Finalist in the 2022 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards for Autobiography (non-regional) -- Growing up in Elmira, Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s was not ordinary. It was total freedom -- fishing, hunting, building things, navigating bullies, first loves, and quiet rebellion -- in a small industrially-polluted Canadian town that shaped a generation of boys who had to figure out the world almost entirely on their own. Neill McKee's vivid childhood and youth memoir takes readers through his formative years with honesty, humour, and self-drawn illustrations that capture the spirit of a boy becoming a man in postwar Canada. From the rock and roll culture of the 1960s, to the shadow of the Vietnam War (the town's chemical factory produced Agent-Orange for that debacle); from becoming a youth leader, to searching for direction in university, Kid on the Go! is the story of every boy who ever needed to escape the life in which he feared being trapped. It's a prequel to the multiple award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo and My University of the World -- the complete trilogy of one remarkable Canadian life told across three books, which can be read in any order or as standalones. For readers of North American coming-of-age memoirs, 1950s and 1960s nostalgia, childhood and youth stories, and anyone who grew up in a small town and found their own way out, or just dreamed about it.​