In Frying Plantain’s opening pages, Kara’s grandmother describes her as “a soft chile” and early in The Student Miriam describes herself as a “scared rabbit”. Readers meet Miriam in her last year of university in 1957 (the second half of her story unfolds in 2005 and gradually reveals choices made in intervening years).
In The Student, Miriam Moscowitz’s parents live a couple blocks north of Eglinton on Heddington and she attends high school at North Toronto Collegiate near Yonge, goes to the movies at the Eglinton Grand near Elmsthorpe, parks with her boyfriend a few blocks south near Wychwood Park, and takes the bus back and forth to U of T, disembarking at Bathurst to walk home via Eglinton. Readers meet Kara when she is in the eighth grade, and follow her until she receives her university acceptance letters. Kara Davis, in Frying Plantain, grows up a couple blocks north of Eglinton on Whitmore and Belgravia, attends school a couple blocks south, frequents the convenience store at the corner of Eg and Locksley, eats at Randy’s Take-Out near Oakwood, and applies to attend York and U of T. Their stories are rooted in quotidian urban detail-readers know where Kara likes to eat patties and where Miriam likes to buy books.While these locations secure characterization, the stories’ themes stretch beyond their borders.
In both books, the protagonists travel in and around Eglinton. The young women’s experiences differ between neighbourhoods (Little Jamaica and Forest Hill) and time periods (one begins in 1957, the other in this century), but what these women share is a struggle to define themselves on their own terms.Ī major east-west thoroughfare in Toronto, Eglinton Avenue is the only street to pass through all six of the former boroughs of Metropolitan Toronto. On the page, however, Eglinton Avenue is on the move: two recently published books feature fictional narrators travelling this real-life artery.ĭebut author Zalika Reid-Benta’s linked-story collection Frying Plantain (House of Anansi Press, 2019) and established author Cary Fagan’s latest novel The Student (Freehand Books, 2019) both present young women whose lives unfold in midtown Toronto, one west and one east of the Allen Expressway. Right now, the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in Toronto is relentless: traffic is crawling.
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