Ladies of the House

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

An especially discerning eye is required to discover the drama inherent in the utterly ordinary, as Sandra Birdsell has done in this second collection of stories of the Lafreniere family, of the fictional Manitoba town of Agassiz.

Already familiar to readers of the well-received earlier collection Night Travellers, the sisters are older now. Like all adolescents, they confidently planned to escape the trap of the humdrum existence into which their elders have fallen; and, like most of humankind, they are inexorably destined to follow those very paths so well-trodden by the feet of earlier generations. The outward trappings may have changed, the essence of the life lived has not. Three generations of Lafreniere womenfolk provide a multi-dimensional view of “ordinary” yet uniquely individual lives.