B.C. writer M.A.C. Farrant has worked as a social worker, a child-care worker, and an accountant. And at various points in Word of Mouth, her fourth book of short fiction, it all shows – for better, and occasionally for worse.

Broadly speaking, Word of Mouth is divided in two. Part One, “Sybilla,” consists of three stories narrated by a feisty welfare mother. Part Two, “Word of Mouth,” is the three-part autobiographical tale of a childhood exploring different viewpoints on the same chain of events; each of these sections is divided into a titled subsection almost every other page, giving the sense of a cycle of prose poems as much as a short story or novella.

Sybilla’s stories come in a working-class first person peppered with slang and grammatical errors creating the feeling of a dramatic monologue. Full of curses and tangents, Sybilla lays out the shards of her past and present in brutal group homes and grim subsidized housing, to reflect without resolving. It’s a kind of social realism that needs no tragic structure – a simple rendering of this character’s reality seems powerfully depressing enough.

Although there are many autobiographical elements to the book’s second part, the stories feel more distant than Sybilla. The form is initially compelling, but the frequent section breaks with a new title to consider every two pages soon begin to interfere with the voices Farrant is trying to sustain. No particular conclusion is drawn from these stories; rather, the pieces have the collective effect of an object being picked up and considered from various angles, then put down, its core barely having been glimpsed.

Altogether, Word of Mouth feels more like conversation than literature, a testament to Farrant’s success at rendering the spoken word on paper.