The basic story is about a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in 1930’s Toronto. I’ll put the publishers notes on the book at the end. Yes, I am very familar with Toronto (live 2 hours north of it) and much of the story takes place in a neighbourhood where my sister lives now. Here are the publishers notes: “Where does one person end and the other begin? That’s the question that haunts Irene, a girl growing up in Toronto during the Great Depression. Living with her father, a pharmacist who finds comfort in the bottle, and her mother, a woman teetering on the edge of her own depression, Irene’s crumbling family situation mirrors the economic and social turmoil just beyond the front door of their respectable, working class neighborhood.As she grows into a young woman, Irene finds herself consumed by her mother’s increasingly erratic moods and isolated from a world where unemployment, poverty and bigotry have taken firm root in the water-starved soil of town and country. Yet in the midst of lives that seem lost, Irene finds strength in the unlikely form of David, a young man from the Jewish farming community of Sonnerfeld, Alberta, who is fighting his own battle for dignity, hope and a place in the world.

Might I ask what The Stubborn Season is about? The part about Toronto life caught my eye as I spent a few months there just last summer.

Do you know the city as well?

I absolutely loved this book and so did our book group. It is very well-written and a great glimpse of Toronto life in the 1930’s. I strongly recommended this book to any reader or book group. I don’t know why it did not ever create more buzz than it did. It is even quite difficult to find copies of it. I had to go to www.abebooks.com to find copies for our book group. (this is website of used book sellers and is terrific.