Having grown up on a 450-acre apple farm outside Pereaux, Nova Scotia, Harrison Wright is a young man still close, in time and place, to his subject. Wright is 26 years old and works at the Kentville Research Station and on his family farm.This first book, Probing Minds, Salamander Girls and a Dog Named Sally, is a memoir of his teen years and early twenties.

Many of the anecdotes in the memoir were originally recounted on the front porch or huddled around the wood stove in the kitchen, a cold beer in hand. Wright writes: “These stories are about living and the passage of time when the characters weren’t too sure how it was they were supposed to go about living … and so they tried to figure out how to go about things on their own.”

Wright reminisces about the simple yet complex pleasures of growing up and hanging out with the MacInnis brothers and other neighbours. He entertains the reader with stories of messing about with tractors, cars, and elderly trucks. He and the brothers MacInnis race a moped across a thawing pond, create an aerial shortcut across a gully, dig a really big hole for no particular reason, and develop a trick with propane and condoms.

Wright’s sentences and paragraphs are lengthy affairs constructed of multiple clauses. At once folksy and sophisticated, his anecdotes venture off on tangents before returning to the original yarn. For example, after beginning a tale about an unchaperoned house party, he recounts an adventure the boys had with an old snowmobile, then saunters back to the party to finish the story.

Though encouraged by friends to set down his reflections after an evening of looking back at his life, Wright was initially skeptical about writing his stories down. But one thing led to another, resulting in this entertaining book of youthful hijinks, enlivened by 16 illustrations by George Walker. Wright fondly recalls a youth spent in rural Nova Scotia, but his memoir will be appreciated anywhere in Canada.