Ruth is equal parts infuriating and hurting. Like Karin, in Alice Munro’s “Rich as Stink”, these girls are angered and confused by the connections they observe between the adults in their lives. In “Thank You for the Lovely Tea”, readers meet Ruth when she is desperate to be out of
It’s been sixteen years since the matriarch Adeline died and her namesake is both daring enough to strip down and swim in a pool and old enough to catch the eye of a male cousin (who is perhaps a little over-interested in her bathing). But overall, Mazo de la
Not his daughter. Not Joyce. Charles Kimber didn’t think she had it in her. But the headmistress has written to say that sixteen-year-old Joyce vanished from St. Hilda’s School and spent the weekend in Albany in a hotel with a young man. A young man from a good family
At one table, we have the Wrights, on the crowded hotel terrace, with the Austrian mountains playing picture-postcard for the family, who has journeyed from Baltimore. They're a cranky lot, with daughters Coralie and Joan having had a different set of expectations for their travels, which neither their mother nor
There is, about an hour's drive from Toronto, a small town called Paris, on the Grand River. I've visited it a couple of times and I have travelled through it, by train, countless times. Rarely, on one of those rail journeys, did I miss that broad curve of the tracks, the
