They Left Us Everything is a quirky little memoir about a quirky family. It’s about a lot of things — about Plum Johnson’s parents and siblings, about the house she grew up in, about caring for her aging mother, about trying to care for and sell their historic old home after her mother’s death, about grief and a family moving on after the parents have died. It’s warm-hearted, funny, sad, and a bit disorganized — very much, it seems, like its author as she presents herself in these pages.
I had a huge “a-ha” moment in the middle of this book. I had been reading along, noticing but not thinking too much about the fact that the family home at the centre of the story was in Oakville, ON, where my aunt and cousin live. Then Plum Johnson revealed that her family’s house had a fake-historic plaque the kids put up as a joke on their father, designating it as the home of a famous “slave-driver,” with a notation that the plaque was placed by the “Oakville Hysterical Society.” I’ve seen that plaque! More than once! I’ve often laughed at it when walking around Oakville on visits to my relatives there, and suddenly, as I realized how often I’d seen the very house this book was written about, the world seemed a whole lot smaller.
But then, this is Canada.
Compulsive Overreader 