Season of Apples

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“By eight o’clock on most Saturday evenings the air in the
confessional was absolutely putrid, an ammoniac mix of cabbage, garlic,
beet, perfume, hair tonic, halitosis, and innumerable body odors that no
simple hose-down could aerate or sanitize.” So begins the story of a
priest who is about to be confronted with a dark corner of his own past.
Ann Copeland fills her stories with so many layers of detail that her
characters develop a surprising heft. Her heroes and heroines tend to be
middle-class Canadians or Americans with so much life experience behind
them that their everyday existence is filled with the complicated
fallout of decades of love, religion, and family obligations.

The lead story in the collection is about a mother who makes a public
fool of herself just to further the career of her ungrateful child. In
another story, a middle-aged son returns to his hometown to bury his
mother, and finds himself reflecting on what his life might have been
had he not become a priest. In the title story, a staid ex-school
teacher is horrified to learn that the acting role she thought she had
landed is really a spot in a inane television commercial. Despite the
variety of settings, all of Copeland’s stories have a lived-in quality
in which readers can smell the cabbage or feel the sun on their face.

This is a fine collection by an author at the height of her career.