SOURCE: Venema, Kathleen. “MacLeod's Repetition Is Numbing, Not Haunting.” Canadian Forum (February 2000): 42-3.

In the following review, Venema offers a negative assessment of No Great Mischief, faulting its weak characterization and repetitious structure.

Alistair MacLeod's two collections of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), have earned him much-deserved praise as one of Canada's great, if largely unknown, writers. Traditional in both style and subject matter, MacLeod's thematically complex stories explore familial relationships as they are shaped by numinous Celtic myth and the natural world. The 14 often hauntingly exquisite stories bear numerous rereadings. They also provoke readers to imagine, as Joyce Carol Oates does in an afterword to MacLeod's first collection, that virtually any one of them might be expanded into a novel.

No Great Mischief is MacLeod's first and, in some circles, long-awaited novel, and it tells a story...