Reviews with content warning for Emotional abuse - Scarborough

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Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez

7 reviews

aspence94's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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jessicacorrigan's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Heart breaking yet beautiful book about a community that is just trying to survive. Makes you think twice about the individuals you may see on the street, on the bus, and in your school. This should be a mandatory read.

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kelly_e's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Title: Scarborough
Author: Catherine Hernandez
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4.75
Pub Date: May 22, 2017

T H R E E • W O R D S

Tender • Necessary • Authentic

📖 S Y N O P S I S

Scarborough is a real-life, low-income and culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, that suffers from high rates of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Told from multiple perspectives Scarborough tells a fictionalized coming-of-age account of three young children, and the tight-knit community leaning on one another in an attempt to rise above aversity and discrimination.

💭 T H O U G H T S

Of the five contenders for Canada Reads 2022, Scarborough was the last one I picked up. And I must say I was absolutely blown away by it. In fact, I was amazed by the quality of this year's Canada Reads shortlist in general, as well as the fascinating debates, which took place from March 28 - 31.

Back to the book, this is another heavy hitting Canada Reads finalist where the structure gave me a front row seat into the minds of each character, thus allowing me to understand the workings of the mind on both an individual and collective level. Told over the span of a year, it was a coming-of-age story but also a story of community, or coming together through the most difficult of circumstances.

Catherine Hernandez writes with such grace, and paints the scene so vividly there's no need to have an awareness of the area of Scarborough ahead of time. In fact, the conditions, the themes and the experiences she explores in this book are so real, and apply to so many different low-income communities across Canada, and the world. Systemic discrimination is so real, and we as a society often turn a blind eye.

Written primarily from a youth perspective, something I greatly appreciated, really opened my eyes to societal issues from the eyes of a child. How they are forced to grow up quickly or take on rolls no child should have to. And yet, I cannot talk about this book without mentioning Ms. Hina. She was a ray of light from start to finish, attempting to create a safe space for the kids and their families. Every impoverished community, need 1000 people like her, willing to risk their personal security to help those less fortunate.

Scarborough is filled with so much human ugliness, but there's also an undercurrent of love and connection. There were moments I felt so ashamed of humanity and in the next moment I'd be overcome with love for humanity. The array of emotion felt so human. There were tears and there was laughter. There was heartbreak and there was joy. Bing, brought so much light and joy to my time with this book. His evolution was absolutely beautiful to watch unfold.

It did not surprise me to learn Catherine Hernandez is a screenwriter, as this book read very much like a script. My only criticism would be that I wanted so much more of these characters, something the writing style didn't allow for.

I'll definitely be keeping my eyes out for whatever Catherine Hernandez writes next, she's just brilliant! Please, do yourself a favourite and pick this book up. It is my hope that it can spark change and that there are a million other Ms. Hina's out there. I've since learned it has been adapted for TV, and I'd be interested in checking out.

Now that I've completed this year's shortlist, I hope to pick up some contenders from past years, and continue exploring the 2022 longlist selections as well.

📚 R E C O M M E N D • T O
• all Canadians
• readers who like realistic fiction
• social workers/case workers/policy makers... the list goes on and on

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"'You will never be too much. You will never be too little, Bernard. You be you.' My heart fluttered hearing her says that."

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daniellekat's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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kassidypf13's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

thebacklistborrower's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Scarborough was the second Canada Reads 2022 book that I read, immediately after reading Five Little Indians, and is also a book ultimately about the connections we have and communities we make.

Scarborough follows the story of a cast of characters living in Scarborough, loosely connected through a literacy program offered through a local library, headed by a muslium woman named Ms Hina. While the program is intended to be only a literacy program, Ms Hina turns it into a social program, with meals for the many families who show up in need of breakfast or snack.

This book was slim but packs a punch. Like Five Little Indians (I’m going to stop saying this now), it was a hard read. The experiences in this book are real. They are happening right now, in Scarborough, and in my neighbourhood. The poverty, racism, sexism, and abuse are so real in this book. What saved me when reading this book was Ms Hina and a shelter supervisor who brought care to these folk who had so few people caring for them.

The connections in this book are in multitude: between Ms Hina and the kids in her program, and their parents; the connections between the kids themselves; kids and the street folk that live outside their homes, and the neighbours that look after them. Some of them are fleeting connections, like the man who heads to a gay hookup, and some are deep, if not lasting.

Any reader of this book will connect over the intensity of this book, and the stories it tells. Whether or not a reader has the lived experience of those in poverty, perhaps they have been the privileged kid looking down on those with less because that is what their parents--and society-- have taught them. Or they have been those like Ms Hina and the shelter worker, creating safe spaces and caring for all, despite everything.

This was a beautiful book and will be one of my top picks this year.

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brogan7's review against another edition

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emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.0

I liked parts of this book a lot, and then other aspects really didn't work for me. The opening with the description of a move in the night from the point of view of a child, was absolutely gripping and had true-to-life details that had me thinking I was going to love this book. The multiple characters with many different circumstances, most of them difficult, gave a strong portrayal of a community as opposed to a single protagonist following a hero's journey trajectory.

However, some things that happened stretched believability to the point where I found it kind of cringy. The parent who defends the literacy worker with a letter--a very literate letter--just didn't make sense with the realities of that family and how generations struggle not only with literacy but with trust of the system (a system that has failed them in many ways). The child who is diagnosed with autism and gets special programming that helps him succeed--the literacy worker who wasn't willing to post a flyer for her own program, who gives the family $50 for the mother to take a taxi to the boy's appointment with a specialist...

Instead of analyzing real problems and illuminating a convergence of disadvantages that are often overwhelming to people and crunch them into poor choices because no choice is the good choice, this book reached for easy answers and betrayed a kind of blindness of the middle class to the realities that people deal with.

There's a line at one point where a parent asks their child to give something up--the older sister surrendering something to her younger brother, and when the girl says yes, she will, the text narrates: "only a neglectful parent could think that was a real yes"--but is that what a child thinks about her own parent? No, that's what a writer thinks from a very great distance and with a lack of compassion for the over-stretched parent just trying to cope, trying to keep both kids happy, one of them more given to tantrums than the other. Calling that a "neglectful parent" says a lot about the writer but doesn't inform the reader about the characters--the ones we really care about.

The one thing I did like about this book is that it asked the question, what does success look like? What does improvement look like? Not one person at a time but a community at a time?--I just wish she had somehow answered that question more fully and more humanly.

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