Seriously - you will start to hallucinate these people on the street.
Thurman-Hunter's descriptions of her family and friends in Swansea (a neighborhood near High Park) are, quite literally, unforgettable: Willa and Arthur and Aunt Aggie and Aunt Susan and Cousin Winn and Aunt Milly and Grandpa and Roy-Roy and Raggedy Rachel. "Do you really mean that?" "Yes, I'm sorry." "No. When her little brother steals and reads her diary, he saves himself from a thorough ass-whooping by apologizing and telling her, "It was just like reading a real book." She stops, hand poised in mid-air. As the story wears on, the family begins to fare better financially and the books turn to rather more frivolous subjects (like boys, kissing parties, and the universal girl experience, the bad perm) and other aspects of our heroine begin to emerge: her ambition to be a writer, for instance, is touched on in the second book and fully explored in the third. The first book, set in 1932-1933 is the most nerve-wracking, set as it is in the profoundest depths of the depression. While it's hard to read the books without feeling serious twinges of nostalgia for bygone Toronto institutions (The Uptown Nuthouse, Eaton's), if you aren't equally caught up in the story of Booky's family, you have no heart (I defy anyone to read the passage where Willa can't go to medical school because she's a girl without feeling enraged).
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