BookDragon Blog

Sometimes, only a good story can keep me adding the miles out there, one foot in front of the other, just to find out what happens next. How fitting to choose a collection called Runaway while I’m trying to make sure I do my training runs just right (gotta get to Leadville 100 by 2014!). Alice Munro – referred to rightfully as Canada’s best short story writer – surely could not be better company.

Her eight stories in Runaway are a moving revelation (yes, pun intended!). In the eponymous opener, a young woman attempts to escape her abusive husband with the help of an older neighbor. Three interlinked stories – “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” – each explore the most important relationships of a single woman’s life: Juliet and her lover-to-be, Juliet and her parents now that she herself is a new mother, and Juliet and her daughter.

In “Passion,” a woman remembers the first summer she spent away from home, her first “taste of life,” during which she became inextricably linked to the much-more-worldly Travers family. In “Trespasses,” a young girl new in town befriends an older woman who has dark secrets that threaten everything about the girl’s very life. In “Tricks,” a lonely woman makes a second date with an almost-stranger for the following year. In “Powers,” two unreliable narrators who become related by marriage, relay the events of more than a half century, starting their intertwined story as a silly young bride and a charming invalid turned journalist, loosely bound together through the decades by a woman with the power to know the truth.

Munro herself is a truthful soothsayer. Her stories about everyday people– sometimes limited, sometimes gifted – trying the best they know how to live their lives, both entertain and elucidate because we recognize so much of our own lives in Munro’s characters’ experiences. Munro plays out the ‘what-if’ scenarios with such natural ease … what if that chance encounter had gone this way, what if she arrived just five minutes later, what if she had not said that, done that … the truth of her writing invites, reveals, then resonates again and again.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2004