This feels like a quintessential Mavis Gallant story: expectations and disappointments swirling around a young girl's form, as she begins to assemble a set of truths about the world. The town in "Wing's Chips" would never make it onto a postcard of Valley-living(Click for source details) Although the setting appears
If the story were titled "Les Deceptions de Marie-Blanche", it might be translated as "The Disappointments of Marie-Blanche": an apt choice. San Francisco Earthquake, 1907 - Click for source details And, yet, as it stands, there is the added implication that Marie-Blanche has not only been disappointed by
For the first time, twelve-year-old Emma Ellinger feels truly connected to her mother. They are finally “doing something together, alone, with no man, no Uncle Anyone, to interfere". Tangier, Moracco 1887 Click for source data It's true that the cruise hasn't gone entirely as planned; they have packed the
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
I laid in with this story, while on a brief holiday in a small town outside Toronto. Outside, the sound of other people's everyday morning scurried past, but I was not required to be anywhere in particular that day. Salzburg Austria, Prison overlooking town [Piotr Bozyk, Click for credit]
