Below the Bridge is an evocative memoir of growing up on the south side of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the 1930s and ’40s. With a poet’s eye for the telling detail and a novelist’s flair for dialogue, Porter deftly evokes the lost community of her childhood—lost to time and the bulldozers of “progress.” This is not so much a memoir or a community history as a conjuring act in which the past is brilliantly captured and brought into the context of the present.