Bank adeptly blends comic and poignant moments to produce a literary cocktail that is as funny as it is touching. She thus reflects her view of love as a bittersweet emotion in the style of her stories. This blending of the comic and tragic is effective because of the force of the narrator's personality. Bank gives Jane a voice which is at once familiar and insightful.

All the stories in The Girls' Guide toHunting and Fishing are told in the first person.

With the exception of two tales, Jane narrates them all. This consistency allows the reader to retain a center usually absent in short story collections. Though Jane changes a great deal as she ages from fourteen to her late twenties, the quirks of her personality remain and become more endearing to the reader. Bank endows her narrator with the force of personality by consistently injecting the...