Cross My Heart is a collection of short stories chronicling the coming of age of narrator Jill Summerfield in a fictional Ontario city in the 1960s. The stories in this second YA offering by Ontario writer Jocelyn Shipley are a memoir-like recollection by the adult Jill of her turbulent teen years. There is rich, resonant, powerful material here, yet only a few begin to dramatically explore with satisfying depth their roiling emotional undercurrents, and truly evoke the spirit of the 1960s rather than merely detail its decor.

The stronger stories, like “My Figure-Skating Father,” feature the dominant theme of the collection: Jill’s warring loyalties, and her struggle to accommodate her self-interest with the needs of her family and friends. Jill’s father is thrilled when 11-year-old Jill takes up his passion: figure skating. But when her father decides to figure skate himself, her friends mock him and Jill is mortified. She ends his skating dreams with an act of betrayal, one of many perpetrated by her and skimmed over by the adult Jill. Here lies a significant failing of the stories: Jill brings to her recollections scarcely any of the inevitable mixed emotions one would feel – joy, loss, regret, embarrassment – and little of the perspective maturity hopefully brings. The father, one of the few characters depicted with warmth, is still an assemblage of eccentricities. Jill never demonstrates much curiosity about her father’s (or indeed anyone else’s) motivations, needs, or character, or remorse over her betrayal of him, her sister Nory in the story “Bridesmaids,” and friend Renata in the potent title story.

Shipley’s unsentimental portrait of Jill and her contrarian, rebellious, self-serving adolescence is admirable, but how much more illuminating these stories would have been had Jill looked back not just to remember, but to understand.