Book Review: Dance of the Happy Shades seems fresh and new, many of the stories told from the perspective of children moving from innocence to experience, learning about life as things are, and not yet to the point in Alice Munro's later, darker stories where things are not always as they should be. Although the stories are set in rural Canada, she writes of universal experiences, captures those moments of humanity that afflict us all. Written in the Sixties, there is little of that era here, perhaps rural Ontario had not caught up to the cities. The stories are quick and to the point, well-honed and precise. Each detail and tiny observation speaks loud and clear. They're also subtle, letting readers reach their own conclusions, each story its own reward. None of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades are as simple as they seem at first, yet none are more diffuse or difficult than they need to be. Most collections of short stories, especially first books, are uneven with a few duds spread among the gems. Here there's only one story ("The Office") that perhaps could've been left out. Yet Munro is such a talent I could see some readers picking that as one of their favorites, because talent is evident on every page. In a "Trip to the Coast" a young girl "accepted the rule of her grandmother as she accepted a rain squall or a stomach ache, with a tough, basic certainty that such things would pass." Another story, "Boys and Girls," sheds its layers as the narrator notes: "A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become." Dance of the Happy Shades is one of Munro's lesser known collections, a hidden treasure that rewards the finding. [4½★]
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