Writing for children tends to be conservative in form. One effect of this tendency is that children’s literature can be a haven for writers who are drawn to traditional forms that are currently unfashionable in the world of adult writing. A poet, for example, who writes in rhyming metrical verse forms is likely to find a more congenial and welcoming place in children’s literature than in small literary magazines. Likewise short fiction. Nowadays, many adult short stories look like geological core samples – revealing, multi-layered, smooth, dispassionate. Juvenile short fiction looks more like something that has been shaped, constructed of such traditional patterns as revelation, surprise, tension and release, a change in perspective, a quest fulfilled.

This potential has been realized in the current mini-boom in short story anthologies for children and young adults. From Lester we had scary stories with The Unseen. Tundra gave us laughs in Laughs. Ragweed jumped in with ghosts in Ghostwise. And there are a couple of anthologies in the works. Kit Pearson is editing a collection of stories concerned with place. Monica Hughes is working on a science fiction compendium. Winds Through Time takes us into Canada’s past in a collection of 15 pieces focusing on specific historical events.

The heart of an anthology lies, of course, in the quality of the individual pieces. Here, as in every other anthology on earth, quality varies. The best stories are excellent: Barbara Haworth-Attard’s “A Hero’s Welcome” is a sturdy first-person account of a young man who takes care of the family farm during the four years when his father is away at the war. When the father returns, a virtual stranger, he does nothing but criticize his son’s efforts. This story has the rock-in-a-still-pond effect of really successful short fiction. The ripples include the pain of men returning from the war, the jockeying for power between fathers and their teenage sons, the relationships between women and their long-absent husbands. Every crisply described physical action in this story – whether mucking out the barn or smoking or the boy’s holding up his father’s medals – takes us deeper into the emotional heart of this family. The turning point, hinging on a single word said by the largely inarticulate father, is believable, understated, and moving.

Less sophisticated but equally effective is Andrea Spaulding’s “Polly’s Frippery.” This ghost encounter story has a girl from today visiting a Vancouver mansion for a Christmas sale and meeting Polly, a young girl who had worked as a servant in the house in 1918. Historical details – the mansion’s secret corridors that allowed servants to move about unseen, its cold attic servants’ rooms, the 1918 flu epidemic – are neatly knitted into what is really a friendship story of two lively imaginative girls.

Some of the contributors have taken advantage of the historical setting to write in old-fashioned styles. Norma Charles, for example, in “The Harmonica,” tells the story of Ben, a “home child,” a poor boy sent from Britain to Canada to work on a farm. Ben is horribly treated by the drunken brutal farmer to whom he is sent, and he finally rebels, fights back, and escapes. No divided sympathies here: the farmer is a villain and Ben’s escape a triumph. This story would not be out of place in a turn-of-the-century Boy’s Own Annual. It is sentimental, melodramatic, and immensely satisfying.

Juvenile historical fiction presents some pitfalls and not all are avoided in this collection. On a couple of occasions the action and engagement of the story are interrupted by the hand of God appearing out of the clouds presenting us with a historical fact. One or two stories come with a whiff of the classroom, the sense of this being good for us. A story of coal mining contains fascinating material but it is over too quickly; this one should have claimed its space as a novel.

The other question about an anthology lies in its cumulative effect. Does the whole thing add up to something significant? In this case the answer is yes. In Ann Walsh’s beautifully written introduction she talks about listening, about the echoes of the sounds of the past. The two themes that echoed most strongly for me were work and illness. The stories touch on a wide variety of working children. A 16-year-old Chinese boy works in a mine to make money to go back to China and buy land. A young girl’s life consists of “lighting fires at five in the morning, scrubbing steps in the freezing cold, peeling ’undreds of spuds or carrots, cleaning up everyone else’s muck, and being yelled at by the whole flippin’ lot.” Farm work, domestic work, chores. Constance Horne in her story “Where There’s Smoke” even manages to use the work of an insurance adjuster as the basis for a dandy detective story. The best of these stories give a real sense of the satisfaction and drudgery of work in the past.

The cumulative effect of these stories also serves to remind us of how dangerous life was in the past. Infant and child mortality were part of the reality of life. Joanne Findon’s story “The Scarlatina” is a fascinating window into not only illness but medical theory in the 1870s. It ends with a scene set in a family graveyard: “Here were four small graves: baby Jimmy, smothered accidentally; John Edwin, drowned in the pond three summers ago; a nameless girl, born dead. And now, Clara Matilda, June 10, 1871 – July 25, 1874.” How did they bear it? Historical fiction at its best gives us a glimpse of the answer. To be commended are the historical notes in the appendix. This is welcome material for the curious and easily skipped by everyone else.

Not all these stories worked for me. Some seemed a bit heavy-handed or better in conception than execution. But the great thing about anthologies is that they are a pick-and-pass affair with their audience, a fact that gives them a wide potential readership and lets book reviewers off the hook.