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Sugar Bush & Other Stories

by Jenn Farrell

While reading Jenn Farrell’s debut collection of short fiction, Sugar Bush, I began to wonder if she had gone to my high school. Her characters seemed eerily familiar. Did we know the same people? Had she known me? It was an uncanny feeling.

Farrell’s stories are primarily concerned with the lives of girls and women. Common Canadian literary territory, one might argue, yet Farrell’s stories surprise with sophisticated twists and unexpected turns. In story after story, Farrell successfully rescues her characters from sinking into cliché, raising them above their very ordinary lives into the realm of the extraordinary. Not an easy task when writing about waitresses working in B.C.
factory towns.

Not that all of these stories have a rural setting. The urban stories are perhaps the more sordid of the collection. “Letters from the Pink Room,” for example, is set amid the ins-and-outs of the Internet porn biz, whereas on the rural side of things, “Up-Island” immerses us in the emotional politics of growing up in a small town. Farrell navigates each world with ease.

The stories that comprise Sugar Bush are often about the desires of women. This is especially true of the collection’s title story, which recounts – through the clever format of diary entries in reverse chronological order – the bittersweet longing of teenage lust. The poignant “Farm Report,” about two young friends living out in the country, is shot through with a different kind of forbidden desire.

Though the longer stories are more compelling than the few pieces of postcard fiction that dot this collection, Farrell’s writing style throughout is both whimsical and unpretentious, making Sugar Bush enjoyable and highly readable.

 

Reviewer: Christine Walde

Publisher: Anvil Press

DETAILS

Price: $18

Page Count: 168 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-895636-76-5

Released: Nov.

Issue Date: 2007-1

Categories: Fiction: Short