Sketching from Memory: A Portrait of My Mother

Susanne Day is a retired education specialist whose focus was physically
challenged, blind, and speech-impaired children.

This book might have been subtitled “Growing Up with Mother,” as the
reader discovers two very clear portraits—mother and daughter—and
the inevitable conflicts that relationship fostered. The book is also a
history of an age that anyone born since 1950 will find fascinating and
older readers will remember with nostalgia. Imagine a Toronto with
farmland just beyond Eglinton Avenue, a Toronto when horses pulled the
wagons that delivered to the door such necessities as milk, bread, coal,
and ice. McLean’s descriptions of the clothes she wore, the
neighborhoods she lived in, the cars she drove in, even some of the
medical practices of those days will awaken memories for many readers.
The author’s splendid word pictures are as vivid as her sketches. Her
book is a tribute to a mother (and father) who managed to bequeath
memories of a good life despite some very trying and troublesome times.