March 2, 2010 Literary Arts

Quick Reads

by jaime eisenR. Brian Hastie

Jonesing for Amy

What Boys Like and Other Stories
Amy Jones
Biblioasis
190 pp
$17.95

In her Metcalf-Rooke Award-winning collection of short stories, Amy Jones assembles a motley crew of outsiders who struggle with their often-mundane lives. Writing her stories in first, third and, impressively, second-person, Jones manages to dig deeper than the characters’ rough exteriors to unearth their troubled pasts and hopes for the future.

Jones’ stories are short and rarely sweet: a self-conscious teenage girl’s first attempt at binge drinking, a grown woman searching for her long-lost rebel sister and a man’s futile attempt to hold onto his drifting lover. Her characters do nothing out of the ordinary. They are misfits, overshadowed by others and left alone to wrestle the chaotic realities of sex, money, love and loss in an unsympathetic world.

Jones manages to incorporate a sense of humour into every depressing tale and always stops just short of resolution. Her writing is quick and hard-boiled—she shrugs her shoulders at her characters’ plights, as if to say, “Oh well, c’est la vie.”

4/5
—Jaime Eisen

Tell Me The Truth partly fictional

Tell Me A Story, Tell Me The Truth
Second Story Press
Gina Roitman
170 pp
$17.95

Montreal author Gina Roitman’s Tell Me A Story, Tell Me The Truth frames the often-heard Holocaust survivor story with a set of engaging and conflicting characters who try to grapple with their storied pasts, and Roitman largely succeeds in winning the reader over with her prose.

Roitman prefaces the collection by explaining that while the characters she created are at their core fictional, she borrowed certain aspects from her own life to make the novel more authentic.

The protagonist, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is the star of the collection of stories, whom we follow as she copes with her Jewish identity—as it relates to a family heavily rooted in tradition—at different points in her life. Although the stories that Roitman explores have a flavour of familiarity to them, she manages to infuse her prose with enough twists that it makes for an interesting and surprising read.

3.5/5
—R. Brian Hastie