It's a great title isn't it? It's actually drawn from one of the stories in the collection, Samuel Martin's story, and it's a perfect fit. You'll see why, when you read the introduction to the colection. Goose Lane Editions, 2013 From the opening pages, readers realize that the
Alfrida's apartment is crowded. “'I know I’ve got far too much stuff in here,' she said. 'But it’s my parents’ stuff. It’s family furnishings, and I couldn’t let them go.' The story about her parents, the loss of her mother, the other family with whom she visits only half-heartedly after
Jinny has been standing on shifting ground. Expectations are thwarted: these are times of transformation. This was true, too, in "Gravel" and in "Oh What Avails". But there she is: the space in which she is standing shifts both literally and metaphorically. Things have been all-a-shift for some time now.
In playing the game, a girl writes the name of a boy beside her own name, crosses out the letters in common and counts off the various states of being: "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage". This is what matters: her relationship with a man. And, reading it that way, it seems
Perhaps, like many of us, Alice Munro has read and fully inhabited a story filled with wonders only to be cheated with the last-line revelation that the guts of that story were nothing but a dream. In contrast, "My Mother's Dream" subverts that expectation and begins with the dream, before
