Once a gem of a short story collection

Long-winded stories take their time to set the stage and elaborate on the characters. The reader can sometimes afford to skim over parts and become distracted. Not so with short stories. Their brevity is what makes them difficult - not easy- to digest. You are forced to pay attention to every word, because, failing to do so can result in you failing to truly appreciate the story.

For those reasons, short stories are not usually my 'cup of tea'. I enjoy the brevity of poetry and can get lost in a lengthy novel, but short stories are usually stuck somewhere in the middle; neither here nor there.

However, a recent collection of sixteen short stories, entitled Once and written by former Montrealer Rebecca Rosenblum, managed to blow me away. Rosenblum's wonderful and careful use of language, the characters she shares with us and the way she manages, in a few pages, to make us care for them, make it a short story collection worthy of recommendation.

Despite this being her very first story collection, it is an undeniably original and assured debut from a young Canadian writer that we're certain to hear from again. She deservingly won the Metcalf-Rook Award for fiction with her honest and true stories of twenty-somethings muddling along in school, in menial jobs, in life, trying to figure out what it's all about.

In "The Words", she describes an absentee father and his daughter's thoughts on growing up without him in the picture. The world-weariness and the sadness that's expressed, is much more poignant than any angry outburst ever could be. "Marcy had always said her father was a nice person, just not ready to be a dad when Colleen was born. [...] Nice didn't mean anything. Nice was just how you looked at it. If red was blue, it wouldn't make a difference, really, in what you saw. Seeing your father as God on a cotton-ball cloud or a guy in Toronto who never called you - just a perspective thing. You didn't get to have dinner with either one of them."

In "Cal is Helpful", Rebecca gives us a glimpse into a harried Grad student's life as he tries to deal with school, part-time work and a recent break-up. "The bookstore was dizzy with Christmas, and Cal got called every five minutes to authorize voids for scared teenaged cashiers. He tried to look relaxed and cheerful, to goof around with the shakiest ones so they wouldn't cry through their mascara and go home early."

Later on, commiserating with a friend over his break-up, he tries to describe his ex girlfriend. "When Mira walked, she didn't walk smoothly across the air." "Walk, present tense," his friend corrects him. "You aren't with her, but she's still walking somewhere."

Cal flattened his fingers onto his face. "That's hard to accept. " "That God didn't punish her for dumping you by making her a paraplegic?" "That she's doing interesting things and I'm not seeing it. "

Loss communicated in such a simple way, is not an easy thing to achieve. Rosenblum's 16 stories are quiet, understated, rich with nuance and beautifully descriptive of a time in people's lives that only appears deceptively easy. Growing up is hard, messy, confusing, paralyzing even; hence why some people delay the process for as long as they can. A wonderful debut from a very talented young Canadian author. I, for one, look forward to future offerings by Rosenblum.