carolefort 's review for:

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

4.0

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I’d been meaning to pick up an Alice Munro book for a while and her recent death was a reminder that life is short. Because I’m not an avid reader of the short story genre, Lives of Girls and Women, Munro’s only novel, seemed like a good choice. And it was. This is the coming-of-age story of Del Jordan, who grows up in the Ontario countryside, surrounded by aunts and uncles, friends and strangers, the latter being the people no one knows who show up at funerals. Del’s observations of her life and her mother’s life are small nuggets of information for the reader to digest. The simple story is happy and sad, funny and painful. Alice Munro has such an eye for the small things that make up the lives of girls and women and the book seems familiar, as if you recognize some of the characters. It was a joy to read this book. Highly recommended.