SOURCE: “Fiction and Fact,” in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3, Autumn, 1963, pp. 451–52.

In the following review of Flying a Red Kite, Lane deems the stories in the collection uneven and awkward.

It's hard to know just how to judge this collection of short stories and other prose pieces [Flying a Red Kite] by Hugh Hood. It meets two understandable desires: that of a writer to get his magazine writings into a more permanent form without waiting in Victorian fashion for the last six volumes of a posthumous 30-volume collected works, and that of a publisher, eager to publish Canadian writing, to have a volume of Canadian writing to publish. Moreover, the collection should give a fuller sense of Mr. Hood's real merits and arouse interest in his future writing. But it is, nevertheless, uneven.

Two of the longer pieces, “Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks” and “Recollections of the Works...