Review of Middle-Aged Boys & Girls by Diane Bracuk

Sometimes I just want to read books about Canada. Even if that Canada is shrunk down, essentially, to only Toronto, there’s something comforting about the Canadian-ness of Can-Lit. You can see the importance of literature that speaks outside the white, male, American/British experience when one finds a book that gives comfort to one’s own experience. So Middle-Aged Boys & Girls — even when the stories are supposed to be cringe-inducing, I can still feel like yay Canada (Toronto)! Yay women! Yay yay!

I can’t say that every story works. The collection’s opener Shadow Selve is too rambly, and feels almost out-of-place with the other, more focused stories. The female characters tend to melt together, a bit bitter, a bit trusting, a bit beat down by life. Yoga keeps reappearing. Passionless marriages. The description of husband and wife as brother and sister appears in consecutive stories. Plus there are unnecessary framing devices, like an in-your-head-conversation to an ex-boyfriend in Prey or what feels like the endless beginning to Doughnut Eaters musing on the neighbours before getting to the actual story which takes place years earlier in Germany.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Middle-Aged Boys & Girls. I did. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I just couldn’t love it. The plots and the writing were at such high a level that when there was a misstep, it was all the more apparent because it felt so out of place. Plus I’m jealous. I’d love to have a collection of short stories published.

Contemporary Canadiana. If that’s what you enjoy, you’ll probably like Bracuk’s book. But you might not love it.

Middle-Aged Boys & Girls by Diane Bracuk went on sale March 1, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.