Leung gives us a sensitively observed, accessible collection of linked short stories set in a Scarborough, Ontario neighbourhood, an immigrant enclave that forms the large eastern section of the City of Toronto. Moving to Scarborough from Toronto’s seedy downtown is not merely a geographical shift for Leung’s characters, it is a confident first step upwards out of the working class and into a lower middle-class way of life.

Leung presents the narratives of diverse group of mostly first-generation Canadians: Chinese, Portuguese, Jamaican, Indian, and Italian. Many stories are from the point of view of older children, friends of young Chinese-Canadian June, who is the closest thing to a protagonist in Leung’s book. The stories explore the underbelly of superficially neat, cookie-cutter-uniform suburban life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As the collection opens, there has been a spate of parent suicides: a kids’ soccer coach, an alienated and mentally ill Portuguese mother of a teen-aged son, and a young woman with small children. Other “pathologies” are considered, too: a well-regarded school teacher is deeply racist; one retired accountant is a kleptomaniac; there’s domestic abuse; and one child character’s uncle has problems with sexual boundaries. This is an easily read, undemanding collection that provides a wonderful snapshot of a Toronto suburb at a particular moment in time.

Rating: 3.5/5 ( )

From Amazon: "The suburbs of the 1970s promised to be heaven on earth—new houses, new status, happiness guaranteed. But in a Scarborough subdivision populated by newcomers from all over the world, a series of sudden catastrophic events reveals that not everyone’s dreams come true. Moving from house to house, Carrianne Leung explores the inner lives behind the tidy front gardens and picture-perfect windows(.)"

Set between 1979 and 1981, years I remember well, being a mom with a school-aged child, this book of linked stories is achingly beautiful. Leung captures those years perfectly. Recommended for every reader of literary fiction. ( )