Bernice Thurman Hunter, who died in May 2002, was Toronto’s L.M. Montgomery. More than any other children’s author who used Toronto as a setting, Thurman Hunter sang the city into vivid life on the page. Montgomery infused the landscape of Prince Edward Island with an almost erotically seductive sensuality; Thurman Hunter celebrated Depression-era Toronto not for its beauty, but for the intensity with which an imaginative child experienced daily life there. The pavements, the laneways, the stink of the dump, and the shrieks of the rollercoaster riders at Sunnyside amusement park – Thurman Hunter’s sharp recall of the sights and sounds of a Toronto childhood gives her stories tremendous immediacy.

Toronto is in desperate need of such writers. I learned when I lived in Manhattan that New Yorkers’ proud sense of identity is reinforced at every turn by the way novels, graphic art, poems, popular songs, and movies burnish even the most mundane New York places and experiences with a glow of significance. In Canada, our movies and novels must struggle to find the spotlight, and anyway, not much is done to extol Toronto in the first place. Coast to coast, Canadians shore up their pride of place by uniting in contempt of “greedy, soulless Toronto.”

No meaningless abstraction, Thurman Hunter’s Toronto is a wonderful antidote to this cliché. Booky, the protagonist of Thurman Hunter’s first three novels, scampers through a Toronto of leafy neighbourhoods and worn-out narrow houses that barely contain the large families of the Depression. Furthermore, Thurman Hunter has the knack for singling out the resonant detail: anyone who grew up in Toronto during the first half of the 20th century will remember the almost sickening excitement of anticipating Kids’ Day at the “Ex” (the Canadian National Exhibition), the slickly varnished semi-circular bench at the back of the old streetcars, the tantalizing aroma of roasting nuts drifting out the open door of the Uptown Nut Shop.

The force of these Toronto memories has little to do with adult nostalgia. The young reader responds to the child’s intensity of experience in the novels – the delight in sensory experience, the deeply comforting familiarity of repeated events. You didn’t “have to be there.” A writer with Thurman Hunter’s mastery of naturalistic recall puts you there.

Thurman Hunter was Booky. Her first three novels are barely fictionalized memoir, and they ring with emotional authenticity and spontaneous dialogue that sweeps along the slight and episodic narrative.

That same voice – eager, unaffected, optimistic – makes itself heard in the pages of The Girls They Left Behind, which Thurman Hunter left unfinished when she died and which was subsequently completed by her daughter Heather Anne Hunter. The result, though ragged, is engaging and disarming in its portrait of a vanished time, when social, political, and sexual complexities seemed non-existent as a nation united against a common enemy.

Thurman Hunter perfectly evokes the mores of her own teenage years. Beryl Brigham, the 17-year-old narrator, begins a diary in the spring of 1943 and ends it in 1945. The novel concerns itself with an adolescent girl’s experience of the Second World War. Beryl, who tries to rename herself Nathalie (because it’s “more sophisticated”), blithely drops out of high school to take a job at the Eaton’s candy counter and then leaps at a chance to earn more at de Havilland, where she helps build the speedy little Mosquito bombers that played an important role in the Allied victory.

Despite her stalwart pride in her work, Beryl is continually frustrated by the passivity of women’s roles in the war: waving goodbye to young soldiers at the train station, packing “ditty bags”to send overseas, scrupulously following the rules of rationing and blackout to help the war effort. And, of course, waiting for “the boys” to come home.

But this is not to imply that Beryl has an anachronistic feminist consciousness. Over and over, Beryl laments that she is “tired of being left behind” by the men, not because she wants to follow them into battle but because she wants them home, safe and available. True to the temper of her times, Beryl unreflectingly dates boys she scarcely knows or likes because “it’s good to have a boyfriend.” She thinks of other females as dreaded competitors (“vultures”) in the marriage sweepstakes. Thurman Hunter is recreating a world in which young women, lacking other choices, focused all their energies on daydreams of romance and marriage. It’s too bad that her charming good nature lets her skim too lightly over society’s surface when she might usefully have hinted at the murkier depths – for example, the torments (and terrible cost to both boys and girls) of the repressed teen sexuality that underlay all that innocent-sounding “dating.”

In this last novel of a writing career rich in productivity and recognition – including 17 novels, the Vicky Metcalf Award, and the Order of Canada – Thurman Hunter still excels at historic perceptions. Reflected in her characters’ lives, for example, is the overwhelming centrality of the Eaton’s department store as an employer, a cultural force, a revered symbol of the mercantile economy. And she accurately depicts the painful moment when a whole generation of Rosie the Riveters went from the joy of war’s end to the bitterness of being dumped from their jobs to accommodate the demobilized “boys.”

This is certainly a flawed novel. The real horrors of war are barely glimpsed, the diary device is erratically employed, and the too-neat and hasty plot windup at the end feels jarringly forced and unnatural.

Still, to hear Thurman Hunter’s voice one last time, in that pitch-perfect dialogue that brings the era surging back to life, is worth the candle. She makes us believe in and care about her characters. Young readers will learn from these pages much of what it meant to be young and female in the 1940s.