I'm dying to get my hands on that - surely it must exist on microfilm somewhere? I wonder why it wasn't reproduced in the book. In the third book, Bea wins an essay contest in the now-defunct Toronto Telegram by writing about her Aunt Aggie (the title of her essay? "The Bravest Man I Know Is A Woman"). Her Aunt Susan started the Uptown Nuthouse during the depression - a double-whammy of impossibility - and her Aunt Aggie ran their Muskoka farm singlehandedly. Even her littlest brothers, Jakey and Billy, develop defined voices and personalities by the third book (I have a soft spot for Billy, possibly because the harrowing story of his birth is addressed in such detail in the first book, or possibly because he's just such a darn sweetheart: "You're the best cooker in the world, mum!") She's got some wonderful spinster aunts, too. 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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