In any collection of short stories there will always be one, maybe two, that will stand out. In Joan Baril’s recent book, The Art of Burglary, she hits it out of the park at least fifty percent of the time, maybe more. Similar to the early Alice Munro collections, these stories follow a particular character, the insatiably curious and always inventive Janet Marsden (a surrogate for the author, perhaps?), from early childhood breaking into her neighbours’ houses (!) to her grown-up experiences canoeing the waters of the Rio Grande and taking part in an Anishinaabe sweat lodge ceremony. The adventurous child may have grown older but her spirit is alive and well in her future self. The best of these stories, if I had to pick one, is “The Most Beautiful Breasts in Thunder Bay”, and here I have to come clean: I’ve read it before—Joan sent it to me a while back—and I’d forgotten how much I liked it. It’s written with a kind of nostalgic wistfulness, looking back thirty years or more to a time when we were important, we were significant—at least we thought we were. We talked about Communism and alternative lifestyles and the war (there was always a war) and we believed our opinions counted and they’d lead to actions that counted. Many of us still think this, even while we bow to the ideas and opinions of the younger generation. You don’t have to be from northern Ontario to enjoy these stories, written with the humour and insight of a writer who knows that the imagination has no age limit.