Stories of kids coping with broken homes are hard to pull off, not only because they’ve been told so often, but because they risk getting mired in the saccharine. But the nine stories in Stephen Guppy’s latest collection manage to skirt both overfamiliarity and oversentimentality, though sometimes just barely. Guppy – the B.C.-based author of three poetry collections and two previous works of fiction – puts all his craft on display here, evincing an eye for the telling detail, an ear for a sentence’s best rhythm, and an instinct for just the right twist.

It’s a shame, though, that such consummate craftsmanship is employed in the service of narratives so traditional as to be nearly void of contemporary life and attitude. The stories are more often plodding than refreshing, and their straightforward competence isn’t enough to raise most of them above the average.

There are exceptions. Shortlisted for the Journey Prize back in 1998, “Downwind” is a moving account of a mother and daughter exposed to nuclear fallout as they flee to a new life in Las Vegas. And the title story’s vivid depiction of a polio epidemic and its effects on a struggling family shimmers with clear-eyed heartbreak.

That many of the stories – including the two mentioned above – are set in the 1950s and ’60s helps explain why such an unmistakable air of nostalgia hangs over the collection, but setting isn’t the only throwback. Although usually favouring a child’s perspective, Guppy’s narratives are most often third-person, distancing us from the characters so that we rarely get a sense of their inner voices. Even his first-person narrators read like constructs, indistinct from one another and all strangely overarticulate. In the best stories this distance can make enthralled spectators of us, but in lacking immediacy, the effect is like watching a writer merely remember.