'Tis Me Again, B'y!

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

Well known for his previous books of personal humor, MacDonald again
serves up some very funny memories of his Cape Breton childhood and his
eventful adulthood in the United States. He invites us to “read about
the first blind date I had with a dog bigger than a foal, which kissed
with frothy slobbers. Then there was a man I saved from a messy grave,
having first relieved him of his billfold.” There is also “The Night
Young Billy Slept with the Pig,” the case of a bungled affair with a
married woman, a description of how he almost ended up in a wheelchair
just by picking blueberries, a lot of Christmas shenanigans, and so
forth.

It’s all fairly amusing, well told, and entertaining. It does,
however, tend to get monotonous if read in large doses, for it is rather
self-indulgent, idiosyncratic, and repetitious. What it lacks, in my
opinion, is a sense of milieu—more social commentary and historical
tidbits. We miss the atmosphere of Cape Breton, the character of its
people, and any sense of the period (or periods) in which the events
happened. There is, in fact, hardly any milieu at all, and that,
unfortunately, makes this a “one-read” book—good for a single
laugh, but hardly worth savoring.