Home in Alfalfa

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.

While recharging her car battery after a winter storm, a bored and
ignored minister’s wife daydreams about running away to a Caribbean
island with a secret lover. A retired businessman loses both his money
and his community’s respect after he invests his life’s savings in a
stranger’s ludicrous pyramid scheme. A lonely widower has a ruined
ceiling and a shotgun-blasted waterbed to explain after a night of hard
drinking on Halloween. A born-again Christian has a crisis of faith when
his wife interrupts his moment of divine rapture to demand that he fix
their leaking roof. Paranoia grips the entire town after someone claims
to have seen a peeping Tom on their front lawn. Despite her inner
misgivings, a middle-aged single woman is goaded by her nagging mother
into answering a personal ad from a single man looking for a wife.

These are a few of the people who make up the very droll landscape of
Hugh Cook’s fictional town of Alfalfa, Ontario. On the surface,
Alfalfans are the cheerful, church-going, salt-of-the-earth types that
most people would expect to meet in a typical Canadian small town.
Underneath, they are simmering pressure cookers leading lives of quiet
(and sometimes not so quiet) desperation. Like a chef filleting a fish,
Cook peels back the guarded surface of each character and uncovers the
skeleton of petty lies, thwarted desires, and long-held resentments that
serve as a backbone to their daily existence. Fortunately, he injects
plenty of humor into his prose to keep the reader from being repelled by
his characters who are, in essence, just average human beings coping
with normal stresses of life. The people and situations in this book
will be familiar to anyone who lives in a small town and very likely an
eye-opener to big-city dwellers who think small-town life is all green
lawns and picket fences.