Nowhere Like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood by Marilyn Carr

I admit, the cover drew my attention, especially the subtitle Tales from a Nuclear Childhood. I enjoy memoirs, and not just those written by the famous, or media darlings, or politicians. Because ordinary people can have interesting lives, too.

In Nowhere Like This Place, Marilyn Carr  reminisces on her childhood growing up in a planned Ontario neighborhood where everyone's dad worked at the nuclear reactor plant, known as 'the plant,' although Carr at first thought her dad spent the entire day riding the bus that he took to work.

With ironic humor, Carr recalls growing up as I did, in a world filled with unrecognized threats. 

Asbestos floor tiles that needed constant waxing and asbestos clay projects in school. Baby car seats with a horn that did nothing to protect the baby. Kids at the beach without lifeguards. Biking all day in bear country, eating wild berries and drinking from the river. Lead paint and eating glue. And snow boots that neither protected from the cold or offered traction on the ice.

She recalls the awful 1960s cuisine of Tang and oleo-margerine, girls puzzling on how to wear snow pants with a skirt or garter belts with a mini-skirt, and the eternal problem of missing Barbie doll shoes. 

It was a world of risk to be a kid back then.

First jobs, hobbies she dreamt would lead to a career, girlfriends and learning about boys--all the normal things girls go through--are recalled.

This was a joy to read, funny and warm, entertaining and nostalgic. There are not deep insights, no overcoming of neglect or abuse. Sometimes it is good to just sit back and enjoy someone's journey.  

I was given a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Read an excerpt here.

Nowhere like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood
by Marilyn Carr
BooksGoSocial
November 3, 2020   
ISBN: 9781771804356
$7.99 Kindle, $17.99 paperback (USD)

from the publisher

Marilyn Carr’s family arrived in Deep River, Ontario in 1960 because her dad got a job at a mysterious place called “the plant.” The quirky, isolated residence for the employees of Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories was impeccably designed by a guy named John Bland. It’s a test-tube baby of a town that sprang, fully formed, from the bush north of Algonquin Park, on the shore of the Ottawa River. Everything has already been decided, including the colours of the houses, inside and out. What could possibly go wrong?

Nowhere like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on earth. It’s steeped in thinly veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.