Booky, the protagonist of Thurman Hunter’s first three novels, scampers through a Toronto of leafy neighbourhoods and worn-out narrow houses that barely contain the large families of the Depression. No meaningless abstraction, Thurman Hunter’s Toronto is a wonderful antidote to this cliché. Coast to coast, Canadians shore up their pride of place by uniting in contempt of “greedy, soulless Toronto.” In Canada, our movies and novels must struggle to find the spotlight, and anyway, not much is done to extol Toronto in the first place. I learned when I lived in Manhattan that New Yorkers’ proud sense of identity is reinforced at every turn by the way novels, graphic art, poems, popular songs, and movies burnish even the most mundane New York places and experiences with a glow of significance. Toronto is in desperate need of such writers. The pavements, the laneways, the stink of the dump, and the shrieks of the rollercoaster riders at Sunnyside amusement park – Thurman Hunter’s sharp recall of the sights and sounds of a Toronto childhood gives her stories tremendous immediacy. Montgomery infused the landscape of Prince Edward Island with an almost erotically seductive sensuality Thurman Hunter celebrated Depression-era Toronto not for its beauty, but for the intensity with which an imaginative child experienced daily life there. More than any other children’s author who used Toronto as a setting, Thurman Hunter sang the city into vivid life on the page. Bernice Thurman Hunter, who died in May 2002, was Toronto’s L.M.
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