Big Town

Big Town is a story of friendship more than a story of Africville, as its cover suggests. The friendship between the dim-witted Early, sick and troubled Toby and tomboy Chub unfolds with the community and its destruction as a backdrop. Narrated by Early, seventeen but with the mental age of seven or eight, is a story of three kids who just want to be kids, while the adults play with politics, sex, drugs and race. Big Town is a heartwarming story of friendship triumphing over adversity, that might have benefited from a little less adversity (with a few exceptions, all the white people are bad, all the black people are good and the three kids suffer illness, abuse, rape, loneliness and every imaginable heartbreak). Readers of local and/or historical fiction will want to add it to their collections.