Growing up and living in western US towns isn’t much different than living in small town Ontario that Ms Munro writes about so well. Some of these stories and characters I instantly relate to; some bring about a sort of recognition – oh is that what it’s about? And some leave me feeling stifled or anxious. All of which say that her short stories are both relatable and lead me onwards.

It’s a pleasure to know there are more in my future. ( )

The young and very young women in these stories are entering adult life with enough material sustenance for survival but lacking essential emotional nutrients. The landscape, however literally broad, is claustrophobic - often suffocatingly hot and parental trellises are few or fractured for the young climbing vines. ( )

Alice Munro’s first collection of short stories is not simply a landmark work of Canadian fiction—it is a significant contribution to fiction written in English. These early stories are steeped in a glow of nostalgia and often turn their focus to young people yearning for independence and chafing against the role that society has assigned them. Also featured prominently are strained or lost emotional connections and diverging generational attitudes toward life and love. The settings are rural and small-town southwestern Ontario in the early to middle decades of the 20th century, a time of evolving lifestyles and hardscrabble self-sufficiency. A number of stories are narrated by children and depict their wonder and apprehension as they come face to face with a confusing but enthralling adult world. In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the young narrator and her younger brother go for a drive into the country with their father, a traveling salesman. Eventually they end up at a house where they meet a woman, Nora, whom, the narrator gradually realizes, is her father’s old sweetheart, and the shock of this hidden dimension of her father’s past thus revealed unveils to her the world as a place of depth and nuance that “darkens and turns strange” the moment you turn your back on it. Other stories place young women in awkward or oppressive social situations resulting from clashing attitudes toward gender roles. In “The Shining Houses,” a young mother, Mary, lives in a growing neighbourhood of newly constructed dwellings mingled in with the old. Mary admires her neighbour, Mrs. Fullerton, a resident of long standing, a cantankerous but strong-willed, independent woman who keeps chickens and sells eggs. Later, at a children’s birthday party that Mary attends with other young mothers like herself along with their young husbands, the conversation turns to a general disgust with Mrs. Fullerton’s “rundown” property and a plan to use a city ordinance to have her evicted. When Mary is asked to sign a petition she refuses, but her confusion is profound, and she leaves the party haunted by what she’s done to herself by resisting a notion that to her seems reprehensible but to others seems righteous and necessary. And in “The Office” a young mother, an aspiring fiction writer, bravely defies social and domestic norms by renting office space where she can work in peace, free of family distractions. But, to her chagrin, her concentration is disturbed, maddeningly and repeatedly, by her condescending and meddling landlord, who refuses to treat her and her artistic goals seriously. The stories are bracingly open-ended and, in their structural elasticity, imply endless vistas of narrative possibility. Throughout, Munro’s prose is precise and controlled and crowded with sensory detail. Her settings live and breathe: the natural world shimmers and pulsates; every texture, every sight, sound and smell of every interior space is rendered with stunning physicality that haunts the reader’s imagination like a lived memory. A virtuoso performance, The Dance of the Happy Shades received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1968 when the author was 37. A must-read for fans of the short story, this book also belongs on the reading list of every student of 20th-Century fiction. ( )

Alice Munro is one of my favorite authors. Over her entire career she has deftly written about the lives of ordinary girls and women - their experiences, their challenges, their dreams. She is so worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she won in 2013.

This is Munro's first published book, and like most of the others, it is a book of short stories. It is just as beautifully written as her later ones, and shows her early power of storytelling. In this volume, which won the Canadian Governor General's Prize in 1968, each story is a gem. Some are about growing up in small-town Ontario - the mysteries of adults, the trials and worries of coming-of-age - of sex, love and work. Others are told with grown-up eyes, looking back at times gone by. There is a feeing of nostalgia in all of them, to be sure. Yet there are also universal truths at the heart.
( )

This was Munro's first published work and it won the Governor-General's Award for fiction in 1968. I think it is fair to say that many of the stories are autobiographical, remembering her early years in Wingham Ontario. She speaks for all of the misfit girls, those girls who don't quite fit in with the other kids at school or even their own family. Having been one of those girls I could relate.

The story "Red Dress - 1946" is about a girl who goes to the high school dance and fears she is never going to be asked for a dance. She almost leaves with another girl but, at the last moment, she is asked to dance. At the end of the night the boy walks her home and kisses her. Then he turned back to town, never knowing he had been my rescuer, that he had brought me from Mary Fortune's territory into the ordinary world. I'm sure that same story could have been written about 1966 or 1986 or 2006.

In "Boys and Girls" the daughter of a fox farmer lets a horse out of the pasture when her father was about to kill it. When her little brother tells their father what she did, the father dismisses it by saying "She's only a girl." Munro's father was a fox and poultry farmer and I'm sure Alice was taught early on that there was no room for sentiment on a farm. As I did, I'm sure she rebelled against that but felt like she didn't really belong to the family.

I think the clearest passage about the feeling of being a misfit is this one found on page 75:
...the difficulties I got into were a faithful expression of my own incommodious nature--the same nature that caused my mother to look at me on any occasion which traditionally calls for feelings of pride and maternal accomplishment (my departure for my first formal dance, I mean, or my hellbent preparations for a descent on college) with an expression of brooding and fascinated despair, as if she could not possibly expect, did not ask, that it should go with me as it did with other girls; the dreamed-of spoils of daughters--orchids, nice boys, diamond rings--would be borne home in due course by the daughters of her friends, but not by me; all she could do was hope for a lesser rather than a greater disaster--an elopement, say, with a boy who could never earn his living, rather than an abduction into the White Slave trade.

On behalf of all the other females of the world who have worried that they will never belong, I want to say thanks to Alice Munro. Thanks for showing us that we're not alone. ( )