Nicole

Rating:
Summary: Growing up in Halifax
Review: I loved this book, as well as Candyman, which was published before it and which is also about Nicole but has more in it about her family. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the seventies--twenty years after Nicole--but the book nevertheless resonated with my own memories. The author is very good at capturing Halifax's own particular atmosphere and identity--a sense of place that has persisted over the years. What I really thought was great about this book, however, was the psychological insight: Nicole's anxieties, fears, flights of fancy, and revulsions are so convincingly, poignantly, and, at times, amusingly rendered that I was entirely taken back to my own girlhood confusions. I don't think you need to have grown up female in Halifax to enjoy this book, however. The realness of these coming of age stories should, I think, speak to many. The author also includes photographs from the period that are absolutely fabulous!

Rating:
Summary: An Enriching Remembrance
Review: This fine book reminds me of how the walk through childhood is often through a fog of myths, dreams, and half-truths -- and rugged stumblings over surprising realizations endured in the awful leaving of that place (but Simone Poirier-Bures shows us that we never really do leave it, we just return with more information). This second memoir of Halifax, told with clear and straightforward style, in which the winsome voice of the protagonist is engaging and believable, quietly opens a door into the awesome innocence, longings, fears, confusion and awakenings of the childhood of a creative girl with an inquisitive mind. Readers tenderly seduced into Nicole's world in the first few pages and held there experience the nostalgia of their own childhood as they share the unfolding events seen by Nicole, for her singular responses evoke universal understandings that most can remember in other places in other times. The pages are tight but full of poignant imagery, and the dialogue is clean and true. Most of all, the characters live on the page and make us curious to keep reading. Perhaps there will be a third book about Nicole. I surely hope so.