Miriam Waddington's memories of childhood embrace adventurous rambles across the prairie in an early Ford, jokes and folk songs around the dinner table, and growing in a family of enthusiastic gardeners. Happiness dominates despite her sense of being an "outsider": "The message that had come through to me in public school in Winnipeg, and again in high school in Ottawa, was that to be a Canadian was to be English, to have your mother in the IODE [Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire] and your father in the Rotarians.... But I was Jewish, and the child of Russian immigrants who were so critical of the economic system that the conductor on the streetcar near where I lived was once moved to ask, 'Your daddy is a Bolshevik, isn't he, little girl"'" This composite image of the freely singing outsider defines Waddington's position among Canadian writers: for...