West coast character studies
Welcome to the Neighbourhood: Stories
by Clea Young
Toronto: House of Anansi, 2025
$22.99 / 9781487013196
Reviewed by Bill Paul
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Short story writer Clea Young likes to write about the predicaments of mothers and parents and the ups and downs of friendships. In her latest collection of stories, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, her focus is mostly on women who live in world of uncertainty and stress. Young writes with wit and great insight about characters who feel overlooked and out of sorts. Overall, these are characters who tend to make bad decisions in life. Many of the stories, which take place in and around Vancouver, evoke a feeling of loss and longing.
One of the best stories is “Shred.” Margot and her son, Callum, find themselves at odds not for the first time. Margot’s a widow who lives near the base of a “cloud-soaked mountain.” In the early days of family life, Margot, her husband Andy and Callum hiked the trails located on the mountain and picnicked on “a plateau overlooking Howe Sound.” But that was the past. Now Callum is older, a single dad and a bike rider who spends his time not hiking but mountain biking, tearing up and down the trails on the mountain. Margot is broken hearted.
The tension between Margot and her son grows as does the tension between a community of hikers and “adrenaline-junkie mountain bikers.” To Margot, they’re a group of “mud spattered” outsiders who are unable to appreciate the outdoors. She’ll fix them. Nothing too complicated. Just make it hard for them to hurtle their bikes up and down the mountain. Here’s Young describing Margot’s frame of mind after she’s had an altercation with a bike rider on one of the trails on the mountain—
The bike judders off, leaving her alone with the mountain. She tucks her hands inside her
sleeves and continues briskly along the trail, made spongy in parts by the coiled root systems
underfoot. As she navigates around fern-festooned boulders and spongy beds of electric-green
moss, the confrontation begins to drain through her body and out the soles of her feet. The
mountain takes it from her, absorbs the hard minerals of her ire, what might have crystallized,
tumour-like, in any other environment. Who’s to say the mountain doesn’t also have this effect
on the bikers? But how can they possibly have time to absorb it, hucking themselves as they do
through such splendour?
For many of Young’s characters, life is messy and within the grand scheme of things there’s always “one more thing to look out for in this world.” In “The Intruder,” a single mother with mental health problems lives with her rebellious teenage daughter. One morning she wakes up to discover that a street person has broken into her home. In “In Loco Parentis,” a kindergarten support worker, Teja, faces criticism when a video filmed by an intrusive parent circulates on social media. Young’s final story in the book features a mother who frets about the presence of an unhoused man living in a tent near her home.
Another story that stands out is “Rescue,” which takes place in the city during the COVID crisis. Riley is a writing teacher who would like to have a closer relationship with her husband and nine-year old daughter. However, Riley tends to get “carried away” with her own personal projects and her priorities are focused elsewhere. For example, in her on-line classroom, she encourages her students to write letters to the government protesting the death of a lone wolf killed in the wild. Out dog walking with a friend, she becomes obsessed with a young boy who she believes is at risk. Like the character of Margo, Riley believes that the world is in trouble and that people need to do the right thing.
The fear that we are facing an ecological crisis and living in a “failing world” is a recurring theme in these stories. One story set in the future, “The Day the Children Left,” follows a group of adolescents who leave their families after a violent fire-storm destroys their community. The group is hoping to settle in an area near a river bank where the smoke has cleared. In “Getaway,” a close circle of women friends gather for a bachelorette party in Tofino only to learn that a weather system described as a “bomb cyclone” is headed their way. In the remaining stories, there are references to traffic jams, noise pollution, carbon footprints and dying trees.
A few of Young’s (Teardown) stories fall short of the mark. For the most part though, she’s a sharp observer of people and their vulnerabilities and how some of our relationships can go off track. She understands that the friendships we make with others tells us something about ourselves and how sometimes we can act against our best interests. In “Crows, Kittens and Mint Juleps,” a thirteen year-old narrator and her friend, Aurora, hang out at each other’s homes for the summer wearing their “first bikinis, shoplifted from the Hudson Bay.”
The two friends have a series of misadventures and on one occasion they get drunk at an outdoor, adult party. Both get sick afterwards but only the narrator feels humiliated and indignant ( mostly towards her mother). The narrator also makes a connection with Beatrice, a young person with a disability, who observes the two friends from her family’s apartment nearby. As the summer comes to a close, the narrator and Aurora get on each other’s nerves and a blow-up between the two occurs. Beatrice, “her face scrunched in confusion,” watches the friendship between the girls unravel. Young writes,
My dad answered the phone and I asked him to pick me up, though it was my mom who arrived in the car.
We would leave on vacation in a few days, and I wouldn’t see Aurora for the rest of the summer. Neither of us would call the other, even after I returned. I kept imagining the excuses I would make for not going over, but I never had to use them because she never phoned. In high school that fall we’d say hi, passing in the halls, but no one could have guessed at our closeness just a few months earlier.
My mom pulled away from the curb and turned the corner. We passed the entrance to Beatrice’s building, and a little farther down the block, heading into the direction of the grocery store, I saw them walking hand in hand, Beatrice and her mother, which I didn’t do with my mother anymore, but that wasn’t the same as not wanting to.
[Editor’s note: Clea Young will appear (with Bill Gaston) in Victoria on May 21 and in Vancouver (alongside Caroline Adderson) on May 22. For details, please check Events on the author’s website.]
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East Vancouverite Bill Paul enjoys photography and reading fiction and nonfiction. [Editor’s note: Bill has reviewed books by Iona Whishaw, Stephen Osborne, Corinna Chong, Gurjinder Basran, Caroline Adderson, William Deverell, Deryn Collier, Jann Everard, Jack Lowe-Carbell, Martin West, Dietrich Kalteis, Suzannah Showler, Curtis LeBlanc, Patrick deWitt, Barbara Fradkin, Dietrich Kalteis, Stan Rogal, Keath Fraser, and John Farrow for BCR, and contributed a photo-essay, “Trevor Martin’s Vancouver.”]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster
