Alberta bound: Thirty stories by Alberta writers

by Fred Stenson

Book by

337 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Cdubbub · Rating 3 out of 5]

Similar to the last book of short stories I read, these started off really strong and then kind of limped across the finish line. Having grown up in Alberta, I did love all the provincial references. Even a mention of the 1A highway had me smiling! Stand out stories from Nancy Holmes, Diane Schoemperlen, Mark Anthony Jarman make it a worthwhile read. One of the best short stories I've ever read, Cache Reward by Catherine Reininger, seems to be the only thing she's published! PLEASE put more stuff out; I promise to buy it up immediately

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good, wide-ranging selection of stories by Alberta writers, ranging from the well-known (Aritha van Herk, Rudy Wiebe, WO Mitchell--who is more associated with Saskatchewan, of course, although he has lived in Alberta, too) to the significantly less well-known (Nancy Holmes, Jan Truss, Mark Anthony Jarman). There wasn't a story in here that wasn't worth reading, although of course some impressed me more than others. Standouts for me include Helen Rosta's "Belinda's Seal," about a father taking his daughters to the zoo, where they experience more than the animals; Christine Bye's "Box Social," about a girl with a crush on a boy in her grade 5 class; Merna Summers' "Ronnie So Long at the Fair," a coming-of-age story about a boy in a small town trying to figure out love and sex and women and manhood, all in a few months; Ruth Krahn's "Homestead Crescent," about a woman coming home to her widowed mother's house for a family wedding; Mary Riskin's "Print Dresses," a spooky story about mourning and loss and retreat from the world; Henry Kreisel's "The Broken Globe," about the conflict in worldviews between an immigrant father and his educated son; Rebecca Luce-Kapler's "The Rawleigh Man," about children's misapprehension of adult relationships and loneliness; Gloria Sawai's "Hang out your Washing on the Siegfried Line," about a brother and sister and their escapes from their small town and their belated understanding of their father. My favourite story in the collection, though, had to be Diane Schoemperlen's lovely and subtle "Clues" (although I don't like the title itself much). It's a wonderful example of a first-person narrator who reveals to the reader so much more than she can understand herself.