Frances Itani has been a fixture on the Ottawa literary scene for some time now, steadily winning prizes and critical acclaim but not, so far, widespread recognition. This, the first of her short story collections to be published by a major commercial house, could go a long way toward remedying that.

Leaning, Leaning Over Water chronicles the years an anglophone family spends in a small Quebec town near Hull while the family’s three young children grow up. Though geographically it’s one province over, in a literary sense this is Alice Munro country, terrain that has also been visited frequently by Mavis Gallant and Margaret Atwood. It has become a real challenge to say anything new about the lives of girls and young women in small Canadian towns in the 1950s, and while Leaning, Leaning Over Water doesn’t really break new ground, it does stand its own in the company of some of Canada’s finest short story collections.

With the exception of the first story, the book is narrated by Trude King, the family’s designated storyteller by virtue of her position as the middle child. By today’s standards, the world she inhabits with her younger brother Eddie and older sister Lyd seems extraordinarily small, both geographically and culturally. The family doesn’t own a television or car until well into the book, and the siblings are not allowed to go to the local cinema because a fire there in 1927 killed dozens of children. The kids play in the river that runs right past their house, attend classes in a one-room school, and are lectured in poetry by their literate and slightly eccentric father. The minimalism of their lives allows Itani to infuse small details with excitement and significance. A New Year’s Eve party at a neighbour’s house is a major event. Possessions are scarce, often handmade, and freighted with memories. A found rosary, a hand-sewn dress, a piano with real ivory keys that Trude polishes lovingly with milk – the stories often grow from simple objects like these.
At first the Kings seem almost too perfect – the idealized nuclear family of a more innocent age. But then tragedy strikes, and Itani slowly makes us aware of the family’s hidden pain, their inability to communicate directly with each other. The siblings eventually leave for the relatively metropolitan community of Ottawa, but they won’t have to encounter the urban, modern world to lose their innocence. Even in their sheltered world, corruption is as near as their neighbours’ house, and danger as close as the water that runs past their door.