Billy Botzweiler's Last Dance and Other Stories

Nora D.S. Robins is co-ordinator of Internal Collections at the
University of Calgary Libraries.

Lesley Choyce is a multi-talented Nova Scotian, equally at home in fiction and poetry. He has published seven books, edited several anthologies, including the Pottersfield Portfolio, and contributed to numerous journals. He is a professor of English at Dalhousie University, and his Pottersfield Press has published many of Canada’s best writers.

This collection contains eight hitherto unpublished short stories. Thematically they explore a familiar terrain — family, love and infidelity, rivalry, coming-of-age. Choyce writes of these everyday incidents with humor and sensitivity.

“Billy Botzweiler’s Last Dance” is the story of one night in the life of Billy, the lead singer, rhythm guitar, and totally unreliable member of a high school rock n roll band. “Major Repairs” chronicles the friendship between a black boy and Jewish boy in a small town. “Paper Route” marks the coming-of-age for one teenager. “Dancing the Night Away” conveys the anguish of the elderly who are waiting to die and of a young man in a dead-end job. In “Prying Loose” an aging swinger looks for true love but finds that he has left the search too late. “Breakage,” “Local Heroes,” and “Family Protection” complete the collection.

Choyce is particularly effective when writing about teenagers. While these stories do not break new ground, they do confirm the importance of Choyce as a writer of fiction.