Scarborough by Cahterine Hernandez was my most recent book club read, and as it turns out, our last book club book until end of August! While I'm sad that we are taking a break from book club, I love that we ended with this amazing book. This is the first one in a long time (maybe ever?) that all four members of my book club loved! Let me tell you a little bit about it!
Scarborough is based in the community of the same name which is part of the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada. The area is made up of a multicultural and diverse low-income population. As I am writing this post, I type "Scarborough" into the news section of google and here are some headlines I see:
So... not the safest place to live...
Scarborough the book features a group of children who attend a public school and frequent the community centre literacy program with their parents. Ms. Hina Hassani is the representative who is running the literacy program, and becomes a huge part of the lives of the children she serves. While she is discouraged from providing breakfasts by the program superiors, she still manages to find ways to ensure all of the children who attend her program have their need for food and other basic needs met. Each chapter alternates between one of several characters, some being children and others being parents or other community members, told in the first person. The story takes place over about 1 school year and Hassani's emails to her program leaders help denote the passage of time and link all of the narratives together.
Despite being a community made up of diverse peoples, Scarborough still faces racism and discrimination, and this is one of the problems prominently featured in the book. Additionally, there are several other challenges faced by the characters such as poverty, homelessness, low-income jobs and difficulty accessing services. One of the things I found interesting was that Indigenous perspectives and challenges are included in the story but are not featured as prominently as I would have expected. It makes me wonder if the book were titled Winnipeg whose stories and perspectives would be most prominently featured, my guess would be Indigenous people. Winnipeg has approximately 12% of the population being Indigenous where GTA is 0.8% and Scarborough specifically seems to be at about 1.1% In Winnipeg, 35.1% of Indigenous people live in poverty and I think that most Winnipeggers would conjure an image of Indigenous people when visualizing the word "poverty". This commentary is not meant to be critical or positive about the book, it just definitely made me realize that poverty can look different depending where in Canada you live.
My book club was in consensus that this book was really great, we just felt that there were some character arcs that felt incomplete, and while we usually agree that books are longer than necessary, this book we all felt was actually a little to short! At about 255 pages, we felt there was definitely more that was left unsaid. Overall, we found this book to be really enjoyable, and a very quick read that we didn't want to put down. We are now exploring options for viewing the film of the same name which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021!