Strictly speaking, there’s not much new about Colette Maitland’s debut short-story collection. Fifteen of the 19 pieces that make up Keeping the Peace have been published elsewhere, and Maitland is remarkably consistent in her themes: loss and trauma in and around Kingston, Ontario. But taken together, her sketches of fractured blue-collar homes form something unexpected: a portrait of a community.

Maitland’s Kingston is subtly rendered, with characters weaving in and out of each other’s stories almost imperceptibly. In “Until Death Do Us Part,” Martha and Keith, on the brink of divorce, attend an open house at the scene of an extramarital affair that ended in double murder. On the stairs, they pass Lynette and Foster Reed, a middle-aged couple who reappear later in “Spark.” The Reeds are test-driving new cars to replace the one their son died in, which was bought at Jimmy Blodgett’s car lot. Blodgett is a good friend of widower Vinnie, from the story “Shoot the Dog.” And so on.

A nuance of the collection emerges: when trauma pulls a community apart, its members turn to familiar institutions – the high school, the local car dealership – for connection. (Of course, some institutions – the military, the church, the prison – also play a role in dividing those families.) Maitland does not judge, but merely documents, which is the collection’s greatest virtue.

But if Keeping the Peace is a community sketch, it lacks the varied perspectives that would give it life. Maitland’s protagonists are invariably adult females, but that doesn’t mean the secondary characters – men, teenagers, the elderly – shouldn’t be fully formed as well. Instead, the teenagers are, almost without exception, riddled with tattoos and piercings; the men are insensitive and often abusive; and the elderly are all demented (though Maitland portrays dementia well). Even the women are depicted as a type: bitter, brittle, and expecting too much of the world. The resulting community is drawn somewhat tightly: it works, but no one could live in it.