There should be a warning on the cover of Carmelita McGrath’s stunning short story collection: “Do Not Read This If You Are Even Slightly Depressed.”

McGrath’s protagonists are mostly women stuck in dead-end or abusive relationships with men who are violent, non-communicative, or simply not there. Most of the stories are set in her native Newfoundland, where jobs are scarce or short-term, and anyone hoping for gainful employment heads west in search of a more dependable income.

One of McGrath’s great strengths is creating honest and believable situations. Whether writing from the point of view of a landlady who becomes a substitute mother when a tenant leaves a young child behind, or writing in the voice of a murdered woman recalling her life, McGrath makes her characters completely plausible.

The Day the Women Went to Town, which includes 16 writers, is a much more uneven and less satisfying collection. In the preface, the collection’s editor, Ronald Caplan, who also edits and publishes Cape Breton Magazine, says he sought strong writing by women “with a significant attachment to Cape Breton, no matter where they now live in the world.”

However, many of the stories aren’t about Cape Breton. In “Passage of Water,” Newfoundland-based Joan Clark devotes 14 pages to the story of a woman waiting to pee after bladder surgery. In “The Finger,” Nova Scotia writer Trisha Fish goes on for three pages about a girl recalling the first time she gave a boy the finger.

Too often, the stories read like works-in-progress. Lynn Coady’s “Batter My Heart,” a memoir-ish story with overtones of alcoholism and hopelessness, draws the reader in, but soon loses steam.

The best known writer in the collection is Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose contribution is an excerpt from her award-winning Fall on Your Knees. Among the stories that measure up to the same standard are Theresa O’Brien’s “A Trailing Memory,” in which a Cape Breton widow returns to Ireland to search for a long-ago lesbian lover, and Carole Bruneau’s “Home Fires.”

This last story is narrated by an elderly widow, whose nine children have left Cape Breton in search of a more promising future. The other mothers in the neighbourhood brag about how their children are successfully working for the government or an automobile plant, but Bruneau’s protagonist knows the truth, and her assessment packs a wallop: “What they don’t say is how they felt the night before, making up a new stack of sandwiches, wrapping them just so with wax paper new off the roll, not saved from the day before. Trying to look cheerful and busy while they’re chewing their lips to keep from sobbing.”