Invisible Shadows takes readers on an intimate walk through one of Canada’s oldest and largest black communities: Preston, Nova Scotia. Author Verna Thomas, born in 1935, mother of seven, and long active within the Baptist church, was born in the mostly white community of Mount Denson but she moved to Preston after she was married.

Fusing memoir with history, Thomas’s personal experiences ground the town’s history and traditions in human detail, helping readers understand the culture shock of moving from a white community to a black one. We witness the pain of childbirth, the struggle to work outside the home while raising a family, and the deaths of Thomas’s mother, father, and husband.

Thomas has a sharp eye for the small but beautiful details of semi-rural life. She describes helping her husband to build the family home by propping up the boards that are to serve as walls with a broomstick while he hammers them into place. Thomas sings spirituals to comfort her dying husband. These moments are threaded with pithy, folksy turns of phrase – when attempting to skate backwards, she writes, “I fell and hit my head so hard on the ice I could smell my brains” – and a wealth of tales told at gatherings, some witty, some salty, some haunting.

Thomas also analyses government programs and church initiatives designed to establish black schools and businesses, demonstrating the effects of these initiatives on the community, as well as the power politics at work among church and secular leaders. Anecdotes and personal narratives lighten these often lengthy passages, and though the information is interesting in itself, I wish that Thomas had dedicated more space to her personal experiences and struggles.