This collection of papers was originally delivered during the Thomas H. Raddall symposium “The Child in Atlantic Literature and Culture” in 1994. That meeting was attended by storytellers, filmmakers, visual artists, actors, and authors, as well as academics. But the academics dominate Children’s Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture. The few exceptions are among the most accessible essays. Isabel Knockwood, a Micmac woman, provides a poignant memoir of family life and her abrupt removal to a residential school in the 1930s. Alan Wilson also draws on personal experience to present a boy’s life in Halifax during the Depression and war years with insight and vivid description. Author Deirdre Kessler explains how her fascination with runaway girls and sharp knives relates to her warm relationship with her grandfather. Another essay describes how a group of children re-created an Acadian festival, Chandeleur, as an educational experience in their own cultural traditions.

The remaining 10 essays are either literary criticism or social history. The social history essays include Sharon Myers’ look at a boys’ reformatory in Saint John in the inter-war years, Sheila Andrews’ examination of the earning power of Acadian girls in a New Brunswick fishing village in the 1840s, and Philip Girard’s study of three child custody cases in Nova Scotia. These essays, well-written and based on careful, detailed research, illuminate the forgotten past of children in Atlantic Canada.

In literary criticism, Carole Gerson, examines how L.M. Montgomery’s work fits into “New Woman” feminist literature, while other essays look at work by Deborah Joy Corey, Alden Nowlan, Norman Duncan, Kevin Major, Hugh MacLennan, Ernest Buckler and David Adams Richards. There is a range of quality here, from Theresia Quigley’s lucid and interesting look at Corey’s work to Paul Milton’s turgid and jargon-bound examination of Nowlan’s novels.

Conference proceedings are often a mixed bag and this is no exception. But these essays are bound together by the tenuous ties of landscape, lifestyle, and a century of economic decline that define the culture of Atlantic Canada, and by the overriding theme of childhood which is, as this book shows, very much a social construct.