The Onlyhouse

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

It’s 1968 and 11-year-old Lucy and her mother have left their series
of apartments around Bathurst Street to move into their very own
detached “onlyhouse,” located in a very “Canadian” section of
Toronto. Lucy’s father died when she was a baby, just after the family
arrived from Croatia. She is “strong and smart and good,” according
to her mother, but she doesn’t know how she will fit in at her new
“Canadian” school, in her class with its rows and rows of blue eyes.
That is, until she meets Jackie, the most popular girl in the school,
and Jackie makes her part of the in crowd. Unfortunately, Jackie has
problems of her own that are, in the end, too big for Lucy to handle.
Lucy finds her own way, and her own friends, just in time to enter
senior public school.

This well-written, well-plotted book is compelling reading from start
to finish. Lucy is a charming protagonist who endears herself to the
reader immediately, as does her mama, with her “broking” English.
Toten is superb in her presentation of whitebread North American life in
the late 1960s; children reading this book are getting the authentic
historical goods on what life was like nearly 30 years ago, from
white-and-gold bedroom furniture to pink cream-cheese sandwiches.

Unfortunately, Toten relies too heavily on certain devices, such as her
frequent use of fairly vulgar language and the frequency with which Lucy
says, “Oh God” (seems like every other page). In the end these
detract from the book rather than adding to its realism. At times Toten
seems to be trying a bit too hard for laughs, usually at the expense of
Mama or the Catholic Church. (There are some genuinely funny bits,
however, such as when Jackie’s group attempts to call someone back
from the dead with an Ouija board, and Lucy says, “I think I have a
dead grandfather, but I never knew him. What would we talk about?
Apparently, nobody got along.”)

There is also the issue of age-appropriateness. Written about
11-year-olds, the book will probably not appeal to an older audience,
but because of some of the subject matter (a teenager’s pregnancy and
suicide), it is definitely not appropriate for readers younger than 11.
It is, therefore, recommended with reservations.