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.

Marilyn Carr is a recent MFA graduate from the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is her fourth degree, but who’s counting? (She is.) Her first memoir, "Nowhere like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood," was published in November 2020. She blogs about the absurdness of everyday life at www.marilyncarr.com, and is currently working on the third installment of her memoirs, "If It’s Shreveport, This Must Be Tuesday."

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Nowhere Like This Place

by Ruthiedee

This is a coming of age story, but not like any other, because it takes place in a place that really is not like any other place. It is the type of town/story that if it were to be made into a TV show people wouldn't believe that such a town actually existed. The town is indeed one of the essential "characters". Carr manages to give us a little slice of life in this unique town. The town shapes all the other characters and everyone is looked back on with humour and understanding. Carr's comfort with the written word is obvious on every page. She plays with words in a way that makes the book a "laugh out loud" read, in the real sense of the expression. We can all recognize a little bit of our own coming of age stories but not many of us can relate to living in the long nuclear shadow cast by the reactors. Carr helps us to try experience it through the eyes of a young girl who actually lived that life.