At first, I wasn't sure if I could read this book. But I'm so glad that I did.
Scarborough follows a number of different characters - some children and some adults - through systemic and personal challenges that centre around poverty, racial and cultural diversity, crime, neglect and more. In one sense, this novel is about the "issues" - those talking points and subjects of interviews that we hear about daily in our news cycles. But just as importantly - perhaps more importantly - this book is about finding the human beings that get so easily buried beneath all the discussion of statistics and funding and policy. This book, at its heart, is about parents and children.
For much of my career, I worked in family support roles, including being the coordinator of family resource centres. The first time I started reading this book, I had to put it down on page thirteen because that was when we are first introduced to Hina Hassani, the new facilitator of a public school location of the Ontario Reads Literacy Program. The language of low-income families and skill development and community resources was so accurate and familiar that I felt like I was being transported back in time to 2003 when I started in an almost identical role. I believed in those initiatives back then, and I still do now, but the families attending those programs and doing their best to raise their children can so easily become lost in the rhetoric. So after a few days of letting myself remember those years, I picked the book up again and I began to read.
Over the next few days, I fell into the stories of the children - like Laura, who desperately wants to take her paper duck and ducklings when she is forced to pack her things in two plastic bags that are tied to her wrists. Or Sylvie, who tries so hard to be helpful as she watches her mother struggle to care for everyone - her, her injured father, and her younger brother who needs an assessement and support, but they are told by the doctor at the walk-in clinic "not to bother". And I fell into the stories of the parents - like Bing's mother, rescuing them both from an abusive home, and determined to love Bing for exactly who he is, despite the ways he is different. And Cory, Laura's father, who is thrown into fatherhood when Laura's mother abandons her at the bowling alley. Cory had one of the greatest impacts on my heart as I read his story - a former skinhead, still brutally racist and angry - but also a father who desperately loves his daughter and wants so much to take care of her. The dichotomy of Cory's character is one of the ways Catherine Hernandez speaks so eloquently about the complexity of humans, especially humans in trouble.
The stories in this novel will stay with me for years. Thank you, Catherine Hernandez, for lifting these human stories up with truth and dignity.
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