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  <description><![CDATA[No Crystal Stair is an absorbing novel that explores an increasingly difficult contemporary reality: functioning as though White while surviving as Black. Marion Willow, a proud young widow, must work at two jobs to ensure that her three girls develop lifestyles not hindered by class and colour. The bitter-sweet experience of Marion's elegant American expatriate neighbour. Torrie Delacourt, could help the girls survive Canada's subtle racism, which, though not legislated, wounds and hems them in. But the women's rivalry for the love of Edmund Thompson, a handsome railway porter, pits them against one another. With humour and sensitivity, No Crystal Stair reveals both the conflict and the human heart of the proud, tightly knit Black community of the Little Burgundy district of Quebec in the mid-forties. It recaptures the days when Montreal was a cosmopolitan hub. It was a city inhabited by jazz musicians, cafe society, artists, gangsters -- those whose world revolved around Rockhead's Paradise--and others who clung to the community church at the end of prohibition, the depression, and the anxious year of World War II.]]></description>
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    <body><![CDATA[<br/>Set in a black community in Quebec during the 1940s, this is a story of a courageous woman making her way in a world that does not recognize her diversity or culture. Marion Willow, widowed with three girls, works two jobs to provide for them. Upright and self-sufficient, she is determined tha...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66188182">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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    <body><![CDATA[The subtle racism which existed in Canada in the years of WWII(And still continue today in different forms). Marion is a strong widow who tries to give her children the upbringing that they will need to suceed in this society. She has to acknowledge the help of Torrie ,a woman who is her rival for t...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21046505">more...</a>]]></body>
    
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    <![CDATA[No Crystal Stair is an absorbing novel that explores an increasingly difficult contemporary reality: functioning as though White while surviving as Black. Marion Willow, a proud young widow, must work at two jobs to ensure that her three girls develop lifestyles not hindered by class and colour. The bitter-sweet experience of Marion's elegant American expatriate neighbour. Torrie Delacourt, could help the girls survive Canada's subtle racism, which, though not legislated, wounds and hems them in. But the women's rivalry for the love of Edmund Thompson, a handsome railway porter, pits them against one another. With humour and sensitivity, No Crystal Stair reveals both the conflict and the human heart of the proud, tightly knit Black community of the Little Burgundy district of Quebec in the mid-forties. It recaptures the days when Montreal was a cosmopolitan hub. It was a city inhabited by jazz musicians, cafe society, artists, gangsters -- those whose world revolved around Rockhead's Paradise--and others who clung to the community church at the end of prohibition, the depression, and the anxious year of World War II.]]>
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