A real community, complete with vividly drawn portraits of real residents, comes to life in Shauntay Grant and Susan Tooke’s Up Home, a tender portrayal of Grant’s memories of growing up in the close-knit black community of North Preston, Nova Scotia.  

The story begins with a woman – the author today? – hanging laundry on a clothesline. The detail of her pensive face suggests that we are looking at a real person, not a composite or character imagined wholesale by the artist. The only words on the first page are “I remember…,” the ellipses anticipating the coming leap backward in time to the speaker’s childhood. Soon we have gone back some 20 or 30 years. We meet a group of children “layin’ on grass/suckin’ on freezies,” seen from above as if we’re looking right down on them as they lie on the dandelion-studded grass.   

In that same natural, colloquial language, we follow the little girl and her cousins and friends as they play outside in tall grass with the sea and sky behind them, listen to music on the radio, sing and dance in church, climb trees, sit around the table while their father plays guitar, and listen to their elders’ stories. These stories range from the narrator’s mother’s tales of similar simple pleasures from her own childhood to tales that “Nana” tells of the hardworking Maroons, Loyalists, and refugees who settled the area and became the modern-day community of North Preston.

Throughout, each and every one of the many faces portrayed are photographically exact. There are also scenes of great beauty, such as the one of a few people bent over soft, vivid green meadowgrass as they fill pails with blueberries. By the end of the book, readers have learned much about the community’s natural environment, culture, and the steadfast love that its people share for each other. Appealing to all ages, this is an unusual and touching book.