тАЬA scintillating debut full of nuanced and achingly human characters.тАЭ тАФ Zalika Reid-Benta, author of Frying Plantain
Back in the low-income neighbourhood where she was raised, a young woman rediscovers the importance of community, home, and finding oneтАЩs voice.
Just before the demolition of her childhood home in east Toronto, Delia Ellis returns to retrieve her beloved diary. Using it as a compass, she rediscovers life as a precocious teen growing up in the nineties.
DeliaтАЩs writings reveal her anxieties following a move to Don Mount Court, a Toronto government housing complex, where she struggles to navigate life with an overprotective Jamaican mother and her fatherтАЩs inept replacement, тАЬNeville the nuisance.тАЭ DeliaтАЩs troubles compound when she enlists her naive younger sister in a scheme to reunite their parents and recapture the idealistic life she yearns for.
Yet, through the lens of adulthood, DeliaтАЩs entries take a wrecking ball to the perception of her parentsтАЩ love story sheтАЩd long built up in her mind, uncovering a childтАЩs internalization of a failed marriage, poverty, and a mother come undone.