Focusing on one area in the city of Toronto, the West End, Roberto Perin traces the enormous and important social, cultural, religious, ethnic, and economic changes that transpired over the years since Toronto's beginning as a British outpost in 1840 with a population of 16,000 primarily English-speaking Protestants to a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis currently home to nearly three million people, over 50% of whom are described as members of a “visible minority,” a term used by the Canadian government to describe those non-Aboriginal people who are non-Caucasian in race or are non-white in color. This definition also underlines an important point that becomes clear in Perin's well-researched study—the difficulty Canada's immigrant population has in accepting “Canadianization,” an effort once promoted by Protestant congregations to gather people of different ethnicities together in the same church in the “expectation that cohabitation would foster Canadianization” (148). However, the number of vibrant ethnic enclaves within the city today would indicate the effort was met with limited success. As Perin amply illustrates, many “visible minorities” including non-English-speaking immigrants, began to occupy and reconfigure closed or abandoned West End places of worship erected by Christian and Jewish congregations who moved from the area or simply closed their doors because of declining membership—a phenomenon not unique to Toronto.

Perin's effort to “track the rise, success, and decline of religion in Toronto over the past century and a half” is an ambitious undertaking (4). Rather than attempt to tackle the entire city, he wisely chose to focus on one area that was familiar to him and his colleague, Professor Gabriele Scardellato, the West End, which he describes as “marked by ethnic and racial diversity,” topics of particular interest to Pepin whose specialty is immigration (8). It is here that he and Scardellato assiduously collected data on 250 houses of worship dating from 1840 to the present.

Perin divides his book into four distinct forty-year time periods ranging from the consolidation of Protestantism (1840–1880), through eras of congregational growth and fellowship (1880–1920), and what he describes as “The Empire of Full-Orbed Religion” (1920–1960), concluding with “Fellowship in the Time of the Shopping Center.” The chapter titles provide the reader with a fairly good idea of the two major themes the author explores:

He discusses the two themes in tandem in the first chapter and separately in subsequent chapters, where he also divides the first theme into two parts: “structural,” referring to how the economy shapes the urban environment, and “conjectural,” referring to major events like the Depression's impact on parishes and congregations (58).

The Many Rooms of this House is a valiant, almost heroic effort by its author to impart to the reader in a coherent fashion an almost overwhelming amount of data uncovered in the course of years of research. The question to be asked is: who is the book's intended audience? Mark McGowan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto, in his blurb for the book says that “it will be savoured by historians of religion, immigration, and architecture, and Torontorians themselves.” Yes, I agree; this book has much to offer a variety of readers. However, the author's attempt to present in often minute detail the impact that religion and immigration had on 250 houses of worship makes his story redundant in places and difficult to comprehend. For example, it is almost impossible to trace the changes occurring in a particular building and/or its congregation over time when that information is scattered throughout the book. An appendix, “Places of Worship in the West End, 1840–2000,” provides names of places of worship in chronological order of their construction, including addresses and changes in ownership, but is of limited value. If I search the appendix for information about the Jewish congregation Tiffereth Israel Bikur Cholem Anshei Ostrovtze listed in Table 4:4, “Synagogues named after hometowns Kielce and Radom Gubernias, Russian Empire,” I would finally find it listed under the year 1892, when Church of Christ erected the structure, not 1921, when it was transformed into a synagogue. This is frustrating for a historian seeking information about a congregation that purchases an existing building and whose name does not appear in the book's index.

Perin rightfully abandons the “silo” approach, often applied to the study of religion and immigration, and instead places houses of worship within their larger context, as he describes it in his introduction. However, I would argue, this can be more reliably achieved by focusing on a select group of buildings from this study that are representative of the changes he describes rather than trying to document every one of the 250. By doing so, he can more clearly track not only changes in the buildings' religious and ethnic affiliations and architecture but also how these changes reflect “the rise, success and decline of religion in Toronto” (4). As a reader and scholar in this area, I would be grateful if Perin would consider preparing an edited version of this book that would be a model for future studies of this important topic.