They say that when families fall out, it's usually about money, but money is often just a metaphor for love. A lot of attention was paid to money in Ruth's family - the spending, or rather lack of spending of it during the Depression, followed by six long years of war. But there are other metaphors for love in these stories: an inheritance, a bicycle, an altered dress, a jar of pickles, a pair of nylon stockings. Metaphors for Love is a collection of twenty linked short stories (nine of which have been published previously) that reads as a novel. It begins during WWII, when Ruth was a seven-year-old girl living in Ottawa in a close-knit Jewish community. Many of the stories take place during Ruth's adolescence, but they also move back and forth in time, over a period of decades, describing the lives of her eccentric grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, neighbours and siblings. These stories are by turns dramatic, heartbreaking, humorous and poignant, with spectres of death and war honing some to an unexpected sharp edge.
