Necking with Louise isn’t exactly a book of short stories; it is rather a series of linked incidents narrated by the same character: 16-year-old Eric Anderson, who lives in a small Saskatchewan town and tells the chief events in his life in the year 1965.

I rarely complain about titles, since I am such a poor hand at composing them myself. Still, I feel the title of Rick Book’s short story collection is misleading enough to warrant adverse comment. Granted, there is a story in the collection entitled “Necking with Louise,” and it’s commonplace in short story collections to choose one title to represent the collection. But there’s only one incident concerning necking, although osculation would be a more accurate term for what happens. Young people, male or female, who get hold of the book for prurient reasons related to the title and cover, with its closeup photo of a kiss, are going to be mightily disappointed. The sub-title should be “Growing up in Saskatchewan” or perhaps – although it’s hardly original – even “Hockey Night In Canada,” since the account of a junior hockey game is one of the best pieces in the book.

The author is a former radio and TV journalist and voice actor who grew up on the prairies, and one suspects that something of his own teenage years has gone into these vignettes. The writing is journalistic, depending for its realistic effect on the accumulation of detail. The conversations are the ordinary everyday banal sort that we all indulge in.

The seasons roll by in this book. Eric goes to a school Halloween dance, his hockey team plays that of a rival village, he survives a sudden blizzard, he takes Louise to the movies, he gets a summer job, he goes fishing, and he mourns the death of his grandfather.

It only gradually dawns on the reader that Eric is a very nice person. He is sensible, sensitive, and imaginative. When his schoolmates are tittering salaciously over the fact that a married couple, not married to each other, have been caught in flagrante delicto, Eric winces at the thought of what the couple will have to endure in a very, very small town. On his summer job he helps a drunkard in rather messy circumstances, he makes friends with the Negro (a 1965 word) cook and his wife and learns about their nomadic life in search of work, and as a farm boy experienced with machinery he handles his driving jobs efficiently. On his fishing outing he tries to rescue a suicide before the young man is swept away by a dangerous river current. He mourns his beloved grandfather with dignity.

As he fights for his life in an all-night blizzard, he cares as much for his horse as for himself. This particular tale of courage and “making do” should be included in any Canadian pantheon of the survival story. He is conscious of his surroundings, both beautiful and ugly: “the crops were just coming up and stretched away from the road like green pool tables”; and the box-like grain elevators jut out against the night sky. As yet he does not have much luck with girls and he does not want to be a farmer. Surprisingly, his major goal in life is not to be a professional hockey player (his family, schoolmates, and the townsfolk are all mad about the game). At age 16, he’d like the mothers of the girls he dates to consider him “dangerous.”

Collections like this that are a linked set of incidents seen through the psyche of a single narrator are rare. Another that comes to mind is Roch Carrier’s Prayers of a Very Wise Child, though Necking with Louise is in no way as profound a book. As in W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind, the prairie gives a kind of solidity to events, although this book lacks the passion of Mitchell’s. All in all, I think this book, the author’s first YA writing, works better as a nostalgia piece for adults than as sexy material for teenagers. Book has an eye for the details of the 1960s, from the shape of the radio to the food served in cafés, to the make of cars to snippets of news about the riots, marches, and protests south of the border.

One last thought about the title: perhaps a better name for this nostalgic look at teenage life would be Sundogs, which is the title of the book’s tense survival story. Sundogs – the warning signs of Saskatchewan blizzards – could also be a metaphor for adolescence itself.