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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