Elizabeth Rouble Hill — The Other Side of the Tracks: Growing Up in Toronto in the Shadow of the Great Depression

This book conveys in a simple, straightforward and very effective language how life was for a working-class family in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century.

 Growing up, coming of age, young perceptions and experiences that capture the reader’s interest and imagination to such an extent that once you start reading, you just can’t put it down.

 Prof. Juan J. Castillos, Egyptologist currently
living and teaching in Montevideo, Uruguay.

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The author's fascinating narrative focuses on her personal contribution to the socialist values quietly gifted to her by her parents.  Each of the 28 revealing, warm, dramatic chapters of discovery and comprehension recount her personal growth. 

 The reader is attracted to her pride in her successes, small and large, as a child, then an adolescent and finally an adult, in breaking down the barriers of the social world into which she and her siblings were born "on the other side of the tracks" within the "cold war" of middle and late 20th century Toronto. Her remarkable story is an appreciative homage to her parents. 

Keith Ellis
Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature at U of T

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In this delightful book the writer endeavours to represent a compelling reality: life on the other side of the tracks. Any temptation of a self-pitying literary treatment would have made the story a prescription to emote. Elizabeth Hill does not indulge in this. She trusts the reader's capacity to empathize by just presenting the facts. This ability to resist the temptation to feed emotions by limiting herself to a simple story telling style is what makes this book worth reading.

 Giovanna Peel B.F.A., B.E.D.
Author of "Starting with Tuscany"