![]() ![]() ![]() That Scatterbrain Booky is the first of a trilogy about Booky’s family life in the east end of Toronto during the Great Depression. But it was my favourite day of the school year. A swarm of overheated kids clamouring to get their mittens off and grab at the neatly stacked piles of softcover wares seems like a past life in these times. Upon hunting it out on my bookshelf, its cover immediately recalled to me the intense elation I felt at the sight of the semi-annual Scholastic Canada book fair table in the drafty hall of my elementary school. ![]() Now, like a Cornelia Funke character I’m quite fond of, I am “always on the dragon’s side, by the way.” But I understood what she meant, and without a beat, recommended Bernice Thurman Hunte r’s That Scatterbrain Booky (1981), a book that my eight-year-old self nearly knew by heart. I was recently approached (in a socially distant manner, of course) by a young friend who was craving “more real” books than the fantasy that she had been reading. As I spend an inordinate amount of time looking out of my window at the park across the street and thinking about how this quarantine Summer is changing the lives of the children in my neighbourhood, I am revisiting a favourite from my own childhood. ![]()
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