The setting of these linked stories is an unnamed, presumably fictional, small town in Nova Scotia, but it will seem familiar to readers from small towns across North America. It’s the kind of town where everyone knows who you are, who your dad is, and what you had for breakfast, and where there’s nothing to do but get drunk, have sex, and talk about other people getting drunk and having sex. First-time author Connie Barnes Rose, a native of Amherst, Nova Scotia, now living in Montreal, neither romanticizes town life nor reviles it. Her characters neither love their home nor feel trapped in it; they simply can’t seriously imagine living anywhere else.

All but one of the stories are narrated by Nancy McKinnon, whose father is the town’s chief of police. Nancy’s not a misfit, or an outsider who dreams of getting away. She’s a perfectly ordinary small-town girl. Rose renders her voice convincingly, allowing her to develop from the surly, vulnerable teen of the early stories into an adult who can sum up her life with a sentence like: “Elliot and I have been married for six solid years, and now we have Rachel, our greatest joy.”

After a while, though, Nancy starts to seem downright one-dimensional. The problem is that there are no stories about her relationship with her father, or her jobs, or her interests. It’s as though someone has gone through a much larger collection of stories and picked out only the ones about Nancy’s love life. Other women, Nancy’s friends, appear often, but they function mainly as confidantes with whom she can discuss her man troubles, and they too are defined exclusively by their relationships with men.

In the one story not narrated by Nancy, Rena, the “town slut,” begins to develop a sense of self-esteem and to change her life, but only when she takes up with one of Nancy’s ex-boyfriends. Even when, in another story, a number of women rebel against their husbands and boyfriends by hanging out and getting drunk together, they call their group the “WDs” – Wives of Drunks. This may reflect the reality of the lives of women in many small communities, but Rose would do better to show characters who are mothers, daughters, thinkers, and workers, even if they think of themselves primarily as girlfriends and wives.