Like dreams, there is a fey quality about Marilyn Gear Pilling’s short stories, and a rawness. The title story in this collection – Pilling’s first – is about the woman with the gherkin pickle nose. Louisa is ugly; she knows men don’t want her. Even Billy, the short farmer with the big nose who looks like a pig and has a sow of a wife, barely notices her. But a woman, ugly or not, has her needs, and Louisa decides she must open the pigpen.

Then there’s Hillary in “There in the Bright Shadow Stands Pierre Trudeau” who dreams of meeting the former prime minister at some Montreal party. Trudeau is wearing a tank top and black shorts. Hillary starts telling him about another old man, her father, and about the pain of watching him lose his faculties one by one. Trudeau seems to be listening carefully, but when she looks down she sees the bulge in the front of his shorts. In “The Terrible Horrible Face – Washer Woman” we see Maggie, who does not like Sundays because Sundays are days when the possibility of something happening does not exist. Then she has a Sunday when something does happen: her daughter goes away to college. After this, every day will be Sunday for Maggie and for no-longer-mothers like her.

The 16 stories in the collection show women – Canadian women – in all their nakedness, the young and the old, as they fantasize, worry about death, share secrets, take mammograms, and eat Sara Lee cake. The voice is neither sentimental nor fussy, the prose spare and fresh. It’s as if the author made a search-and-destroy list of clichés and vowed to see every twig and teacup for the very first time. Halfway through the collection, however, the stories lose their sharpness and begin to merge, as the main characters seem to look alike, think alike. A little variety would have made this otherwise entrancing collection just perfect.