Worlds Unrealized: Short Stories of Adolescence by Canadian Writers, Vol. 1

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

If lengthy and concentrated effort alone guaranteed excellence, the six
years that went into editing this two-volume high-school textbook would
make it a masterpiece. With the goal of exploring adolescence by means
of Canadian fiction, Garrod and Webster, both academics, have collected
39 short stories under the headings “Sexual Awakening,” “Family
Relationships,” “Friends and the Peer Group,” “Loss of
Innocence,” “Identity,” “Religion and Values,” “The Dark
Side of Adolescence,” and “Transition to Adulthood.” “The main
criteria for inclusion in this volume,” they write, “were high
literary merit and that the story deal insightfully with the experience
of adolescents.”

I write this review as two different people: a critic, and a sometime
teacher of high-school English. As a critic, I oppose treating
literature as sociology; to do so is to limit or negate our appreciation
of style, and it is style that determines quality. Here, the subject
matter forces the editors to chose Gallant’s fine “In a War” over
such better, yet thematically unrelated, stories as “The Ice Wagon
Going Down the Street” and “Irina.” As an English teacher,
however, I am aware of how limited a teenager’s sense of relevance can
be, and of the need to sometimes cater to that. I thus recommend this
textbook. Still, it is unfortunate that the stories could be only
Canadian. This forbade such classics as Anderson’s
“Sophistication,” Hemingway’s “The End of Something,” and
Stafford’s “The Mountain Day.” Even if such an exclusion was
somehow necessary, where are Blaise’s “A North American
Education,” Metcalf’s “The Teeth of My Father,” and
Mukherjee’s “Danny’s Girls”?