To each their own: words that sum up the ideal and the struggle faced by the characters in Mona Lisa Smiled a Little. Alameida Kerwell has the ideal nuclear family: a husband, two grown daughters, and two grandchildren. Like all families, the Kerwells struggle to communicate, to understand, and to truly accept each other. Each looks at the decisions made by the others with a combination of condescension and contempt. Each portrays their own life choices as superior while concealing their envy of others. These characters are capable of inflicting upon each other the small cruelties that sting so deeply because they come in the guise of loving “advice.” And, surrounded by family and friends, each of these characters is fighting an internal battle with loneliness.

This is Rachel Wyatt’s second collection of short stories featuring Alameida and her family. Wyatt, who retired this spring as director of writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts, has created moving characters whose poignant need to be recognized for who they really are is very powerful. Alameida, in particular, leaps off the page.

Her pride, her love for her daughters, and her desperate attempts to find meaning in her life are vividly portrayed as she struggles to cope with her husband’s retirement, her own impending retirement, and the painful realities of aging. Alameida’s life is not easy, and she faces several overwhelming losses; yet her spirit is resilient, and ultimately, she triumphs.

Wyatt laces her stories with a sly sense of humour that prevents the collection from becoming maudlin. The reader comes to understand and accept the reasons these people make the choices they do, even as the characters in the stories cannot. Wyatt’s prose is spare yet compelling, and while each of the 19 stories stands on its own merits, read as a whole, the collection builds with a subtle intensity and reaches a moving and satisfying conclusion.