Angel Square by Brian Doyle
1984, Groundwood, 144 Pages, $9.95
Children’s book; A Phoenix Honor Award Book
This story is a ten-year-old-child’s POV of Lowertown in 1945. In the wake of the Second World War, some people are home, and some are missing, or recovering. This is a “setting” book. The target audience is 9-11, but reading it as an adult didn’t put me off because of the simplicity and earnestness of the narrator.
The setting is focussed around Angel Square, a hub in Lowertown, north and north-east of the Byward Market. Around this hub is a French Catholic school, whose students are called Pea-soups, an Irish Catholic school for the so-called Dogans, and a public school for Protestants and Jews. The main character of course has friends in all communities and navigates around the racism of the day.
The story is that a Jewish man is assaulted, and our school-age narrator alongside his friends from each community investigate the crime, and eventually find the culprit. An avid listener to radio-dramas, he takes the persona of the “The Shadow” in his crime-fighting escapade as well as his anonymous letter to his crush.
In addition to the racial animus, another artifact of the story is the role of media in this pre-television time. People collect trade comic books in the days before slick graphic novels, share newspapers, and listen to the radio. The King’s Christmas address being something that no one would want to miss.
Another standout of the story is that Lowertown was a very working-class, read poor, area. The area today is hardly Rockliffe Park, but has certainly diversified over the past eighty years. 1991 film was filmed in the Edmonton because of Lowertown’s gentrification. The Strathcona area of Edmonton can pass for a working-class area in the 1940s, but modern Lowertown certainly cannot.
This book is a nice light read, great to read to kid, or skim over to get a sense of how things were, once upon a time.
★★★★☆
